Truth. (15.)
Directed by James Vanderbilt.
Starring Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Stacy Keach and Bruce Greenwood. 124 mins
The release of Truth, a film about how some top journalists lost their reputation and jobs trying to expose the strings pulled to keep the young George W. Bush from serving in Vietnam, has two big things going against it, at least in this country. Firstly, it comes out the week that Spotlight won the Oscar. Secondly it is a paean to Dan Rather, the revered U.S. news anchor. It’s not just that Rather is more or less unknown over here, but that the American custom for bestowing gravitas and importance upon news readers (like their need to have daily late night chat shows) is a TV tradition we just don’t get over here. Will tears be shed when Huw Edwards hangs up his pink tie for the last time?
In the run up to the 2004 election a team on the flagship current affairs show 60 Minutes, led by the journalist who exposed Abu Ghraib, Mary Mapes (Blanchett), set out to expose Bush’s time in the Texas National Guard, discovering evidence that not only had he got out of serving in ‘Nam, but then went AWOL for a year from his cushy number before leaving early to go to Harvard. But the report is rushed out to meet a deadline and begins to fall apart almost immediately with sources retracting and changing their stories, and people casting doubt on the validity of the documents they have found. Nothing is disproved, but the detractors manage to shoot so many holes in the messenger that the issue of what Bush did, or didn't do, is effectively sidestepped.
It’s a film where journalist sit around eating takeaway food, explain everything with giant grids on whiteboards, walk at a pace while delivering exposition and nobody arrives on screen without having their names and position put up on a title underneath them. The novelty moment is when halfway through they stop congratulating themselves and are confronted with the possibility of weakness and uncertainty. Having their blustering sense of integrity questioned is an interesting place for a movie like this to go but though the film seems to concede the possibility that mistakes were made, it remains entirely on the side of the journalists (it is based on Mapes’s book after all.) Ultimately this talking shop is being engineered to set up three grandstanding speeches – one each for Grace, Redford and Blanchett – that express the decline in values and corruption in both American journalism and public life.
As talky and worthy dramas go it is fine but hard to love. It is a little self pitying, but also maybe self aggrandising for Redford to identify himself with Rather; portraying himself as a noble crusader for truth and justice who has been brought low by the system, and the whole film smacks of defeat. The Bush jr, administration has made us all zoo keepers at the elephant house, and we will spend decades trying to shovel up its messes. Here we are squabbling over his wartime cowardice and not even being able to nail him for that. The mean get meaner, the rich get richer and you’re stuck here with the other losers watching Truth and feeling hard done by.
Truth. (15.)
Directed by James Vanderbilt.
Starring Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Stacy Keach and Bruce Greenwood. 124 mins
The release of Truth, a film about how some top journalists lost their reputation and jobs trying to expose the strings pulled to keep the young George W. Bush from serving in Vietnam, has two big things going against it, at least in this country. Firstly, it comes out the week that Spotlight won the Oscar. Secondly it is a paean to Dan Rather, the revered U.S. news anchor. It’s not just that Rather is more or less unknown over here, but that the American custom for bestowing gravitas and importance upon news readers (like their need to have daily late night chat shows) is a TV tradition we just don’t get over here. Will tears be shed when Huw Edwards hangs up his pink tie for the last time?
In the run up to the 2004 election a team on the flagship current affairs show 60 Minutes, led by the journalist who exposed Abu Ghraib, Mary Mapes (Blanchett), set out to expose Bush’s time in the Texas National Guard, discovering evidence that not only had he got out of serving in ‘Nam, but then went AWOL for a year from his cushy number before leaving early to go to Harvard. But the report is rushed out to meet a deadline and begins to fall apart almost immediately with sources retracting and changing their stories, and people casting doubt on the validity of the documents they have found. Nothing is disproved, but the detractors manage to shoot so many holes in the messenger that the issue of what Bush did, or didn't do, is effectively sidestepped.
It’s a film where journalist sit around eating takeaway food, explain everything with giant grids on whiteboards, walk at a pace while delivering exposition and nobody arrives on screen without having their names and position put up on a title underneath them. The novelty moment is when halfway through they stop congratulating themselves and are confronted with the possibility of weakness and uncertainty. Having their blustering sense of integrity questioned is an interesting place for a movie like this to go but though the film seems to concede the possibility that mistakes were made, it remains entirely on the side of the journalists (it is based on Mapes’s book after all.) Ultimately this talking shop is being engineered to set up three grandstanding speeches – one each for Grace, Redford and Blanchett – that express the decline in values and corruption in both American journalism and public life.
As talky and worthy dramas go it is fine but hard to love. It is a little self pitying, but also maybe self aggrandising for Redford to identify himself with Rather; portraying himself as a noble crusader for truth and justice who has been brought low by the system, and the whole film smacks of defeat. The Bush jr, administration has made us all zoo keepers at the elephant house, and we will spend decades trying to shovel up its messes. Here we are squabbling over his wartime cowardice and not even being able to nail him for that. The mean get meaner, the rich get richer and you’re stuck here with the other losers watching Truth and feeling hard done by.
