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State of Play is one of those frustrating films in which you are being entertained, scene by scene, but almost every time you start getting into one element of the film and it’s coming together, it flits off to explore the other elements… and you don’t feel like it’s building into a crescendo, but that that each time it gets distracted, you are being asked to build your interest and emotion all over again from scratch… until the film shifts back to somewhere you were excited about before… but once again, you have to get back to the level of energy you had watching the earlier bit… and by the time you do, on to something else.

The second major problem with State of Play is casting. And I’m not talking about Brad Pitt being in it or not being in it. I don’t know whether he would have made much of a difference or not. He may have muddled it more. I’m talking about the casting as it exists now. It is all over the place and really makes no sense.

I feel terrible, for instance, for Ben Affleck, who gives a good performance, feels right for the role – taken out of context – but who is 8 years younger than his “college roommate,” Russell Crowe and 6 years younger than his “wife,” Robin Wright Penn. Both of the other actors are not only looking their age, but take full advantage of every line on their faces and every ounce of their maturity. Thing is, the movie could have turned this into an asset… but doesn’t have the time to do that… because the movie is not about that. And it’s already about so many things that it can’t really stop to get into unexpected ideas. For instance, I instinctually felt like Della, Rachel McAdams’ in-house blogger, is working more on the same level with Affleck’s young Congressman than his wife or his college pal who seems to have been on the beat for a decade longer than he has. Affleck’s playing Crowe’s friend, but they too would be separated by a generational shift in technology.

Thing is, Russell Crowe, even playing his real age (he seems to be playing older, though the story seems to want us to see him as 45, max), feels too young for his role. Guys our age may not all be webheads, but the anti-web curmudgeon thing is generally left – amongst thinking people who are not just endlessly paranoid about losing their jobs… and Crowe’s guy here is pretty cool and cocky – to people at least in their 50s. And even many of them are now hip to the online room. Looking at Crowe’s character, as he stands now, at the age Crowe is, you get the feeling that he might love “the old way,” but would have forced himself to learn how to use the web to gather intel years ago. And if he hasn’t, fine… but we need to have a clearer sense of why. A beard and a beat up car are clichés of a era of which he isn’t old enough to be a part. We need more.

Conversely, Rachel McAdams, who is fine in this role and at her age, is a shadow figure in the entire film. There are times – and I mean this seriously – where my mind starting thinking that she was CGed into the background of scenes or that they reshot to give her 2 lines in scenes that she wasn’t in when they first shot them. When she is wrestling with The Paper or Crowe, she is okay… still underdeveloped… still not really using the tools of a first-gen blogger the way they are really used…but she is okay. But as Crowe goes on his investigation, she is nothing but background noise in the story. Which, again, is not her fault… but the fault of the overreaching ambitions of this project.

The bad movie version of McAdams’ Della – and thank God, they didn’t really go here in the film – would be her hacking some impossible-to-get-to-piece of information from a government database in 30 seconds to prove she is a web person. But where is the person who has sources she never speaks to or has even met, but who will send her a text with some real insight when she needs it? Where is the idea that she can use the resource of a community that shares information differently than the old schoolers would ever think of doing? And the biggest missing idea is really getting into the immediacy of blogging and how quickly things can get way out of hand… that The Bad Guys would be checking into her blog for posting or her Facebook or her Twitter account, which she would be using throughout this situation at least every hour or as some do, every few minutes. A guy can now follow you down a dark alley without ever being in the alley. That is The Obsessive Web. Della can have a dozen untrained eyes around town working, in a friendly way, for her while Crowe’s Cal is still looking for people who really know something, one at a time.

Not in the movie. Nothing like it anywhere to be found.

A six-hour mini-series could have held it all in quite brilliantly with the same writers and same director. But the movie has to make the choice, over and over again, about which story to focus on… and the other stories always pay for that necessary choice.

Now I haven’t seen the original Brit mini-series. And looking at the casting, the age elements seem to be similarly confusing. In fact, The Old School Reporter was played by a 33 year old (at the time) actor and The Guy In Parliament (I assume he was in Parliament) was played by a then-39 year old. The Young Reporter was 27 at the time, so not much of a generational rift in those 6 years.

And really… none of that from the other film matters…

One of the main themes of this film is a generational shift, the old way fighting the new way, and both showing their strengths and weaknesses. And I haven’t really touched too deeply on how this works in the political thriller part of the film. Again, it is the Old Guard, here into bribes and big money and no interest in humanity, versus the new kid on the block who could be president in 6 years – a la Obama – so must be stopped, above and beyond the details of this story. What does The Establishment do to stop The New… how far will it go… how dark is that road?

Again, an interesting element to this film… but not so much in the film. The specific of the particular intrigue kind of overwhelms it as a big picture theme… and the other themes suck out all the rest of the running time.

Amazingly, Die Hard 4 did a better, if somewhat absurd, job of telling this story on the tech side, with the geeks both fighting and supporting McClane’s retro hero. Obviously nothing so outscaled would be appropriate here. But there is a very real and not yet well dramatized difference in the way the digital and the analog minds work. That was the opportunity that was created in whatever version of this script it was where this came up as a theme. By not really exploring the “what would have happened with Watergate if Woodward & Bernstein not only had some of the info the pursued door-to-door on the web, but struggled with finding it there, and were also having the same story pursued by others who were 100% fluent in web but who didn’t know the players and never made actual contact with them, while at the same time had people in the newsroom looking over their shoulders who were ready to leak mid-process reporting to web sites that were more than happy to scoop W&B with W&B’s work and none of their own other than the hard work of clicking on an e-mail” angle with any depth, the opportunity was lost.

Additionally, by blurring the natural, if stereotypical age and moral weight groupings of the actors involved without acknowledging the oddities, the movie keeps the audience slightly off balance along the way.

Thing is, I can’t say that State of Play is a capital-t Terrible movie. It’s certainly no Body of Lies, which was a real mess. It really isn’t. If you don’t care that it flips around like a fish in a boat, never escaping to the water, never being fried up in a pan, you’ll be fine with all the high-quality distractions. I know that I was. But as I kept being frustrated by being pushed here and there and everywhere, my grip on the experience taken away as I was constantly asked to find the next one, I got frustrated and disinterested and judgmental. That’s not where I want to be in any more.

There is a really great movie in here… somewhere. Maybe it needed to be a really great mini-series. It was no small feat to get this to work. Traffic is the great example of where it did… and still, there was complaining from the peanut gallery because it so simplified what the mini-series had done. But that is the nature of adapting bigger to smaller. Take too big a bite and no matter how delicious the fare, you choke.