‘The New Yorker at 100’ Review: A Century of Journalism That Refuses to Fade (Netflix)

Any journalism student, anywhere in the world, knows—or should know—what The New Yorker is and what it represents. For those of us who started studying journalism a few decades ago, when print newspapers and magazines were still part of everyday life, the magazine was always a kind of curious ideal, one that was probably out of reach. Not that anyone seriously imagined writing for it, but more than once we wondered whether a publication like that could even exist in countries like ours. And the truth is that, having worked at major outlets during their better years, I’ve come to believe that the sort of rigorous journalism The New Yorker produces—journalism almost entirely insulated from market pressures—was, is, and likely always will be almost impossible anywhere else.

The New Yorker has always stood out for its long, deeply reported pieces, its distinguished contributors, its cartoons, its fiction, and its unmistakably polished presentation—an aesthetic that gives it an air of sophistication and intellectualism that some critics dismiss as “elitist.” It’s true that it isn’t a magazine for every reader, but it’s not one that shuts anyone out either. The subjects it tackles, the tone of its humor, and the way it seems to capture the texture of New York’s cultural life at any given moment invite readers—or at least this reader—to step inside its pages. It feels almost like an aspirational way of approaching that idealized world.

The documentary marking the magazine’s centennial tries to replicate, in its own way, the kind of piece The New Yorker itself favors—a style the magazine helped invent and that has since become part of the standard vocabulary of journalism, nonfiction writing, literary reportage, and even documentary filmmaking in its many variations. The New Yorker—the publication that first ran Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—is the godfather of true crime, investigative documentary, and the modern profile. And Marshall Curry’s film tries to follow those same narrative parameters. The problem is that the format has become so codified that the film ends up looking a lot like countless other historical documentaries.

Still, even within that formula, The New Yorker at 100 proves remarkably effective at sketching a century of the magazine’s history. In truth, it’s more a celebration of its present than a straightforward historical overview. Curry touches on the past no more than half a dozen times, zeroing in on the magazine’s founding, its early years, its rare editorial shifts, and the landmark stories—written by some of the most important voices in American journalism and literature—that shook the country. Among the highlights revisited are its reporting from Hiroshima, its investigations into corporate pollution, James Baldwin’s essays, the ever-controversial figure of Capote, and the recent Harvey Weinstein reporting that helped spark the #MeToo movement.

But the film’s axis is the present, and its narrative structure revolves around the making of the magazine’s centennial issue, overseen—just as the publication itself has been for more than 25 years—by David Remnick. The assembly of that issue, with its regimented workflow, gives the documentary an excuse to spend time with many of the magazine’s writers, editors, and departments: from its veteran film critic (Richard Brody, occupying the space once held by Pauline Kael, who gets only a passing mention) to the much younger music writer (Kelefa Sanneh), its international correspondents (Jon Lee Anderson), its science and culture writers, its celebrated cover editors and cartoonists, its fiction team, and its still-envied, still-indispensable fact-checking department—so essential, yet increasingly rare. The magazine’s elegantly appointed newsroom in One World Trade Center is the setting for most of the film, though the cameras occasionally follow its reporters into the streets, their homes, or their interviews.

Informative and precise, though necessarily selective given its short running time, The New Yorker at 100 also serves as a reminder of another era of journalism and cultural conversation—one that, for reasons the film doesn’t attempt to unpack, The New Yorker continues to preserve as if time hadn’t passed at all. More than once, the magazine’s writers and a handful of celebrity guests (Jon Hamm, Sarah Jessica Parker, Molly Ringwald, Jesse Eisenberg, among others) remark on how strange it is that a magazine like this still exists amid today’s half-truths, conspiracy theories, and social, cultural, and political fractures. The kind of journalism The New Yorker represents may be a losing battle, but it’s impossible not to admire the persistence of a group of obsessive, dedicated professionals who seem determined to keep fighting it to the very end.