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Is it possible, working as a reporter, to ever lose the anxiety right before the publication of a big story that there might be something within it way off base when you’d been so certain it’d been as spotless as it could have been? Absence of Malice (1981) sees that anxiety coming true and the aftermath having a long tail. Only it’s a consequence dogging one of the worst reporters I’ve ever seen in a movie doing something in a series of somethings that tend to at best suggest no one ever taught her basic journalism ethics and at worst suggest she’s gone through life without much by way of common sense or decency. 

That reporter is Megan Carter (Sally Field), of the ostensibly esteemed Miami Standard, and that first something is thumbing through a file seemingly absentmindedly left behind on a subject’s desk without permission and then writing a story based solely on what she quickly glanced. About as ethically lax as their apparently star reporter, her editors decide to publish the piece without adequately vetting its basis — let alone looking into a way to legally obtain a copy  — and without adequately reaching out to the person it will affect the most for comment: a liquor wholesaler named Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman).

The file suggests that Gallagher, the son of a late criminal, is being investigated for potential involvement in the murder of a longshoreman’s union official. Once the story’s been published, though, it seems like Gallagher is very likely not involved at all and that the file was left out as a way to intentionally mislead Carter and the public for murky reasons I can’t say become that much clearer as the movie goes on. (The movie was written by onetime Detroit Free Press executive editor Kurt Luedtke.) Carter is left to clean up the mess made by her reckless reporting — which would have been a lot more reckless had her editors not requested a couple reasonable tweaks to avoid additional trouble that she bafflingly balks at — to find out what’s really going on.

Carter will only keep making more messes. It’s hard to tell whether Luedtke wants us to find her and her paper objectionable or if to his eye this is business as usual, the media people in the audience the only ones who might be giving pause. In the course of the movie, Carter also drinks while doing a background interview, handles a sensitive source with a (to the source’s eye) life-ruining secret so gruffly that the latter kills herself, and gets — I suppose not that shockingly, considering he’s being played by Paul Newman — romantically involved with a source.

Lots of movies centered around journalists who are terrible at their jobs are still entertaining even as we question their methods. This isn’t a call for movie journalists to all be ethically pure, either. The trouble is that Absence of Malice’s plot is so muddy and generally uninvolving even when some details are clear that we’re mostly left with a not-that-interesting journalism drama about a reporter we struggle to care about because she has such a rash disregard for not only the truth but for sources who should be handled more delicately. 

Absence of Malice doesn’t work as a romance with an illicit charge, either; Newman and Field don’t have any chemistry. Still, I liked Newman’s not-completely-forthright performance as a man you sometimes believe is the good guy he indirectly claims he is and other times wonder whether there’s something he’s hiding after all — if his sidling up to Carter has something ulterior lurking beneath it. It’s a nice change seeing Newman play a supposed good guy you’re never fully on board with, though I’d rather it be in the context of a movie with which I was on board.