Truth

Frequent readers of this blog will know of my dislike of a certain type of one-word movie title. I don’t mean ultra-specific, fictional proper names like Cinderella, Videodrome, or Skyfall, or abstract but still particular terms like Jaws, Tootsie, and Moonstruck.  What I object to are titles that consist of a single word that could describe literally thousands of pictures—like Gladiator, Invincible, and Brave. It’s not just that single-word names seem lazy and vague; it’s the presumption that a movie could be such a definitive embodiment of a subject that it deserves to possess that subject as its moniker. If you’re going to call a movie “alien” or “Manhattan,” that movie better be as consummate and iconic as Alien and Manhattan. This year we’ve already gotten (in descending order of how well they’ve earned their titles) Room, Dope, Grandma, Breath, Aloha, Focus, Brooklyn, Ride, and Spy.  The audacity of a Hollywood docudrama about TV news taking Truth for its epithet is such a laughably idealized elevation of such inherently compromised mediums that it goes beyond the pale. 

Truth tells the story of the 2004 scandal after CBS’s 60 Minutes II aired an election year report that investigated the circumstances surrounding then President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.  Both the show’s award-winning producer, Mary Mapes, and its presenter, CBS News anchorman and managing editor Dan Rather, lost their jobs after their ethics, political loyalties, and journalistic standards were called into question. Based on Mapes’ memoir Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power, the film takes her for its central character. The always-mesmerizing Cate Blanchett plays Mapes with passion and intelligence. Robert Redford plays the supporting role of Rather and pulls off a performance that is more than just a simple impression. Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Topher Grace, and Bruce Greenwood round out the cast as various other CBS News players. All the casting choices are smart, especially Stacy Keach as the retired Lieutenant Colonel who provides the questionable memo that get Mapes and her team into so much hot water. 

Truth marks the directorial début of James Vanderbilt, writer of the brilliant and more exhaustively detailed story of real-life journalism, Zodiac (a film that definitely merits its one-word title). But this film might have benefited from a more experienced director. Fictionalized versions of recent events are tricky to pull off, and Vanderbilt makes the rookie blunder of cinematically showcasing many of the already overwrought monologues he’s written for his actors. Richard Francis-Bruce’s editing and Brian Tyler’s music are similarly heavy-handed, and quickly reduce the docudrama to melodrama. 

The film is absurdly reverential in its depiction of Rather and the 60 Minutes team. It treats the network’s shameful reaction to this episode as the final nail in the coffin of serious, informed, beneficial TV journalism. But in truth, the golden age of TV news was dead even before George W. Bush’s father was in the Oval Office. If Vanderbilt really wanted to show “the truth,” he’d spend less energy painting Mapes and Rather as heroic martyrs and instead emphasize how the critical mistake they made was a direct result of the all-too-often rushed process and sizzle-over-steak quality of television newsgathering.  Investigative journalists of the print world (those that are left) still sometimes spend years researching, verifying, and fact-checking a major story to the point where they not only get it right, it becomes difficult to dispute that they got it right.  News magazine shows like 60 Minutes II, on the other hand, frequently lack enough prep time to meet their deadlines, and adequate screen time to explore all the critical angles of a story. This is touched on in the film, but in a way that merely makes excuses for the protagonists. 

Of course, Redford’s participation in Truth brings to mind the greatest film about news gathering (and the greatest docudrama ever made), All the President's Men, in which he and Dustin Hoffman play Woodward and Bernstein, the dogged reporters who broke the Watergate story. Contrasting the power of that remarkable picture and its lasting effect on American understanding of political history, with recent movies like Truth, Shattered Glass, and Kill the Messenger, which barely register in the public consciousness, is utterly depressing. Truth and Shattered Glass may cover events far less culturally significant that Watergate, but Kill the Messenger, about the CIA's alleged role in importing cocaine to secretly fund the Nicaraguan contra rebels, is arguably even more important. We’ll have to wait to see the reaction to Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (another single-word titled film due for release a few weeks after Truth) before we’ll know if movies about journalism can still affect the public discourse, or if they are as inconsequential as network TV news has been for the past decade.