Take Two Tabloids and Call Me

By RICHARD CORLISS

Newspapers -- remember them? They're where people used to get their infotainment before CNN, Hard Copy and the Letterman Top 10 list. Kids don't read them much anymore; newspapers are nostalgia items for the geriatric Gutenberg generation. And even more anachronistic are newspaper movies, which were nearly always about rapacious reporters chiseling bereaved losers out of their private dignity. Five Star Final, The Front Page (His Girl Friday in the Cary Grant edition) and Ace in the Hole were papers in nutshell, tabloid on celluloid. They gave you the headlines, the editorial and the funnies too. The subject of these movies wasn't even newspapers; it was the American urge for speed and aggression -- corporate, personal, romantic.

+ With a smart cast and a chic patina, Ron Howard's The Paper reprises this theme, less to celebrate old times than to offer a skeptical perspective on career men and women. Henry Hackett (Michael Keaton), metro editor for the Sun, a New York City tabloid, has to worry about a local race crime -- or is it a mob rubout? -- on a day when he should be thinking about his pregnant, ex-reporter wife (Marisa Tomei) and the cushier job she wants him to take at an uptown daily. There are clever doses of cynicism and office politicking, but at heart The Paper wants to be a Front Page for the New Age; most of the tough talk is about ethics. "It was always the truth," intones the paper's columnist (Randy Quaid in a savvy, genial turn). And Henry snarls indignantly, "Not everything is about money."

The recipient of these sentiments -- and of a righteous punch from our hero in the film's most ungainly scene -- is the Sun's female managing editor, played by Glenn Close in a haggard, predatory tone, as if stranded between Fatal Attraction and Sunset Blvd. One can detect here the fine misogyny of screenwriter David Koepp, who had Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn destroy themselves for vanity's sake in Death Becomes Her. (Koepp wrote The Paper with his brother Stephen, a TIME senior editor.)

Having dug up the bones of a cunning old genre, Howard lets the flesh hang like crape. There's beaucoup bustle but not much pulse. The pace is too slow for farce, the characters too cartoony for drama. Whereas His Girl Friday ran its gags on the fast track, The Paper often slows down to lend its galaxy of star types (Robert Duvall, Jason Alexander) a hint of dimension to their roles. But these subplots aren't much more sophisticated than those in The Wizard of Oz: Duvall gets a heart, Close a brain, Keaton courage. Tomei gets a baby -- and gets left out.

In His Girl Friday, Hildy Johnson wound up with the exacta: she got to ditch her fiance and keep her job. Back then, having it all was getting paid for work you loved doing. Maybe the old days -- and the old movies -- were more modern than we thought.