CJR AT THE MOVIES
Dublin, June 1996
A Fatal Attraction to Crime Reporting
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Veronica Guerin |
Veronica Guerin was a fearless, muckraking Irish journalist who was murdered in 1996 by gangsters who were embarrassed by her stories. A new Hollywood film named for her captures the drive and intensity that made her both famous and vulnerable. But perhaps not surprisingly, the film sidesteps the thorny journalistic issues raised by the way Guerin did her job and, more importantly, the way her editors let her to do it.
Trained as an accountant, Guerin dabbled in public relations before drifting into journalism at age thirty. Though she was a relative latecomer to the business, Guerin's ability to cultivate sources and her willingness to go anywhere, anytime for a story allowed her to rise to the top of the field in just a few years.
In 1994, she began to specialize in crime reporting. Like some other journalists, Guerin had good sources in the Garda Síochána, Ireland's national police force. But she went further, developing contacts among the criminals whose exploits she covered, and who fed her disparaging personal information about their rivals. One of her unflattering stories, for example, reported that a gangster named Martin Cahill had fathered children with his wife and his wife's sister. This was risky, uncharted territory, trying in the court of public opinion criminals who eluded the courts of justice. In effect, she and her newspaper, The Sunday Independent, changed the rules of what was considered fair game in the coverage of organized crime.
Guerin worked her own hours, wrote from home, rarely entered the newsroom, and was not chummy with other reporters, many of whom resented her relatively swift rise to the top of her profession and her unconventional methods. The way she got information was an ethical minefield, one she navigated on her own. Her editors gave her a long leash and seemed content with the tradeoff in which they mostly didn't ask questions and she delivered exclusives. In one scene of the film, her editors and her newspaper's lawyer ask her about a story in which she reported that a gangster named Gerry Hutch had orchestrated Cahill's assassination. She is never asked to identify, nor does she disclose, her source for the story — another gangster, whose motives and credibility were suspect.
This is the second feature-length film about Guerin. The first,
When the Sky Falls, starring the American actress Joan Allen,
was released in Britain and Ireland in 2000 but never got a U.S.
cinematic release. (It is available as a video rental.) In Veronica
Guerin, the slain reporter's life gets the full Hollywood treatment,
with a big-time producer (Jerry Bruckheimer), director (Joel Schumacher)
and star (Cate Blanchett). Schumacher deftly captures the venality
of Dublin's underworld as well as Guerin's status as an outsider
in mainstream journalism. Blanchett delivers a performance that
hints at the ambition, competitive streak, and tenacity of the
real Veronica Guerin. An Australian, Blanchett nails Guerin's
accent and looks hauntingly like her. Her Guerin is more complex,
less naive, and more manipulative than Allen's.
In Veronica Guerin, the reporter comes across as brave, resourceful, determined — and reckless. As the threats to her personal safety mount — in one instance, a warning shot fired through a window of her home; in another, a shot fired into her leg when she answers a knock on her door — even nonjournalists in the audience were asking why her editors didn't pull her off the story.
It's a fair question, one never satisfactorily answered in real life, and one that doesn't get the needed hearing in this film. As she lies in a hospital recovering from the leg wound, Aengus Fanning, the editor of The Sunday Independent, urges her to get off the crime beat.
"Write about fashion, write about football," Fanning says. "What if I told you that I wouldn't publish your stuff?"
But Fanning's suggestion is just that. Guerin, whose son was six when she was killed, had said she would quit the paper if she weren't allowed to stay on the crime beat; Fanning never forced her hand. Guerin's family wanted her off the beat, but her editors capitulated to her demands. The film subtly suggests why they did: after she was wounded, her newspaper plastered ads on the sides of buses, exploiting the attack for promotional purposes. The attacks on Guerin made her a celebrity, a commodity.
At the end of the day, as the Irish say, you wonder not so much
why Veronica Guerin risked her life as why her bosses didn't do
more to protect her.
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