Clever NY Times doco suffers from ADD

THE MAIN criticism levelled at Page One: Inside the New York Times is that director Andrew Rossi is incapable of concentrating on one subject, choosing as he does to flit between the stories, people and ideas captured during his 14 months of filming.
 
Kenneth Turan of the LA Times notes that although the fly-on-the-wall documentary has its good points, watching it is "like talking to a smart person with a severe case of attention deficit disorder". The result of this is "a scattershot approach that leaves you hungry instead of satisfied".
 
Perhaps unremarkably, the New York Times' review agrees. Drafted in from outside the paper to avoid a 'conflict of interest', political commentator Michael Kinsley compares the film to a "shopper at the supermarket without a shopping list". Page One, "careers around the aisles picking up this item and that one, ultimately coming home with three jars of peanut butter and no two-percent milk". The Times deserves a better movie, Kinsley concludes, "and so do you."
 
But all of this is to miss the point of a documentary about a news organisation, whose everyday fluctuations resist the imposition of a simplistic narrative arc.
 
"It's not a newspaper article or a well-structured op-ed," writes editor of Motherboard.tv Alex Pasternack in the Huffington Post. The point is that "the story is still developing... and it's complicated".
 
The film's meta-subject is the media desk's attempt to cover the story of the demise its own industry in the age of the internet. One of the questions it explores is whether the New York Times could, would and should die, touching on the paper's well-publicised mistakes vis-a-vis Jayson Blair's inaccurate reporting and Judith Miller's uncritical reporting, as well as the rise of bloggers and citizen journalism.
 
For Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, the answer is simple: "the web is awash with Jayson Blairs and Judith Millers. Rules were broken at the Times, but at least the paper had rules."
 
Trade magazine Variety points out that although the film "hardly counts as a revelatory dispatch", its insight into the mechanics of the paper offers "a crash course in the time-honoured mechanics of good reporting" which are increasingly threatened by the blogosphere.
 
The stand-out star of the film, however, is NYT media and culture columnist David Carr. A former crack addict and self-confessed admirer of the paper, it is Carr's biting opinions and old-fashion 'gung-ho' attitude that give the documentary its voice, winning the praise of every single critic.
 
"The movie is almost a profile of him as much as it is a portrait of his employer," writes Michael O'Sullivan in the Washington Post. "But that's nothing to complain about."
 
Page One: Inside the New York Times is in cinemas now. ·