Truth

The poster for Truth, a movie about TV that should have been a TV movie.

 

I saw Truth at the London Film Festival – 2015 is probably the first year that I’ve gone to the festival and not seen a film that has ended up on my best of the year list.  Either my choices this year have been bad, or it’s been a bad year for the festival.  Anyway, it was nice to do the red carpet thing in Leicester Square.  Cate Blanchett looks nice in the flesh and Topher Grace has a hot girlfriend.  I’ve never been in a cinema and been that far away from the screen.

Truth tells the story of how, in the run up to the 2004 US Presidential election CBS News ran a story alleging that George W Bush had lied about his service in the Texas Air National Guard, and had got into the Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam.  Watching it, you realise that not only have many Americans not moved from the Iraq War, they haven’t moved on from the 2000 Presidential election (one character says if the story had run then, Bush would have lost), and they haven’t even got over Vietnam.

Being British, I found it hard to get worked up; we all missed Vietnam here (thank you Harold Wilson, you KGB spy), and Bill Clinton also got out of serving.  Big dicking deal; conscription is a bad thing and leads to bad troops.

The substance of the allegations is probably true, but the CBS team (led by Mary Mapes, played by Cate Blanchett), used documents it was impossible to verify, and may have been faked.  An internal investigation led to Mapes losing her job as a producer, and Dan Rather (played by Robert Redford, obviously cast for the echoes of All The President’s Men) resigned as presenter of 60 Minutes.  Dan Rather, CBS, 60 Minutes; we’ve heard of them all, but I doubt many British people could explain who or what they were accurately.  The film will have a limited life outside the US.

The one thing it does show, and I thought was good, was how one little inaccuracy can derail an important investigation; the documents not being genuine does not mean the whole story isn’t true, but if there is one mistake, your enemies will pick up on it and rip your whole story to pieces.

There is far, far too much exposition too.  Characters explain too much, title cards tell you who people are.  Cutting to a house where Mapes lives, the caption tells us it’s Dallas, Texas.  Thanks guy, but I’m watching an apparently intelligent film, I know where Dallas is, and it doesn’t fucking matter anyway; it’s a house, it’s not important to the plot.

It’s another cargo cult film; all the right elements are in place, it should be a great film, but it’s not.  The story is a Vanity Fair article, or at most a TV movie (Game Change, starring Julianne Moore, is a far, far superior TV film about American politics).  All The President’s Men ends with the great Ben Bradlee, played by the great Jason Robards, telling Woodward and Bernstein, after they’ve messed something up, the following “You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll? Half the country never even heard of the word Watergate. Nobody gives a shit. You guys are probably pretty tired, right? Well, you should be. Go on home, get a nice hot bath. Rest up… 15 minutes. Then get your asses back in gear. We’re under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I’m going to get mad. Goodnight.”

In Truth, you just have Robert Redford bemoaning the decline of TV journalism.

The film showed the differing attitudes to the press in the US to the UK; there they revere journalists, here we, well, if we don’t despise them, we come close.