Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Please don't spend money on this.

Great Film overall

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Pretty good film depicting journalists trying to get dubya down before a second mandate. It backfired against them. True or not, lots of people tried to avoid going to Vietnam and even escaped by thousands to Canada. This could not bring him down.

So Dan Rather and his Producer Mary Mapes report that there's a smoking gun 'letter' that proves George W. Bush's father's political connections evaded Vietnam. That's the only truth here. It was in the environment of 2004 Presidential election, and the obvious motive was to draw contrast to John Kerry who did serve in Vietnam and help Kerry defeat then-President Bush. This 'letter' proved to be a fabrication as the font used in the letter wasn't invented until more than 20-plus years later. Thank God this falsification occurred before the election, but I shudder to think if had not been found to be a fake until after AND Kerry had won in a close election... So why would there be a movie made showing rank liars and people trying to undermine our democracy by lying and hiding under the First Amendment AND making them heroes? Just watch CNN or any other of the 'main stream' news and you'll realize that they are no longer concerned with reporting facts and context, today they are trying to manipulate you by 'reporting' things as they see it through their liberal narrative. PERIOD!This is probably one of the lamest movies I've ever seen, trying to pull every emotionally manipulative string. What else would you expect when the co-writer is laughably Ms. Mapes herself?? Talk about self-indulgent. But I guess the biggest question is: which movie executive gave the green light to this sh!tpile and who even went to see it??

Powerful non-fiction drama about the modern-age tactic of tearing apart someone else's news story for fear of its validity--or rather, finding a vulnerable link in that story and attacking it, dissecting it in the public eye, until nobody remembers anymore what the point of the actual story was supposed to be, only that a flaw was found and therefore it's a crock. Cate Blanchett is excellent as "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes who, just prior to the 2004 presidential election, thought she found a tasty piece for the television news program on CBS: questioning whether President George W. Bush received preferential treatment during his time in the military. With hard evidence in the form of letters and documents that Bush did skate by (going AWOL for one year), Mapes and her team beat a five-day clock to produce the story news-anchor Dan Rather (Robert Redford) reported on the air. All appears to be fine after the segment airs, but when pro-Bush camps go after the accuracy of the documents--perhaps smelling a liberal bias--Rather, Mapes and her crew are all called on the carpet by nervous network executives. An investigation of journalism, of television news and its ethics, of politics in the business of TV news and the internal workings of breaking a story about a story all come to the fore here, in generally grand fashion. Redford, initially, seems a curious choice for Rather; he looks nothing like the legendary television personality, though he does have Rather's cadence down and you come to believe in the performance. Blanchett and her support, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace and Elisabeth Moss, are all terrific. Director James Vanderbilt, who also co-produced and adapted Mapes' book, "Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power", does fluid, engrossing work. While the theatrical film faded fast at the box office, it plays very strongly on cable or home video. This might have been the perfect HBO event movie, the intimate medium of television a better fit for the material. *** from ****

This film is bad.This film feels a lot like that year's Spotlight, only with a much worse script and less competent direction. So far as the acting is concerned, where to place the blame is a bit difficult. It just feels awkward sometimes. That awkwardness, though often due to clunky delivery, is largely derived from the dialogue. Vanderbilt doesn't seem to know how to write it. A lot of the double speak Cate Blanchett's character uses to address both her abusive past and her journalistic struggles is heavy handed and obvious. Nothing is subtle. Certain lines are clichéd to the point of being cartoonish ("don't you understand?"). While the dialogue and direction I feel pretty well explains middling performances from competent actors like Blanchett and Redford, sometimes actors are just bad. There's even a bad child actor. Not all children are bad at acting. Some are very good. They are like any other actor and should be judged on more or less the same standard as their adult counterparts. With that in mind, the child actor in Truth is still bad. Like his adult peers it isn't all his fault, some of his lines are just terrible. The bad adult acting suffers the same, though the flat delivery really doesn't help. Flatness is not the only problem though. Like I alluded to with Blanchett's character's heavy handed double speak, Vanderbilt is not good with subtly. At one point he seems to doubt so much that his audience gets the point that he dedicates a three minute speech to a character basically laying out his political opinion just so we don't miss the point of his two hour movie. It's honestly a little surprising that an experienced screenwriter feels he has to resort to it. It's not surprising that this is Vanderbilt's directorial debut. While the direction of the actors is generally not the best, most other aspects of the film just go to show his inexperience. There is visually nothing interesting. The cinematography is generally flat and the only variation in shots is how centered or balanced they are, which, given the somewhat stale office setting much of the film takes place in, isn't really that impressive. The lighting, color, and set design are all serviceable, nothing more. There didn't seem to be any thought to having the visuals of the film play any real role in telling the story (There is one shot which does show a power imbalance purely through the way a large number of characters are situated across the protagonist, demonstrating the odds being stacked against her, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this was coincidental given the pattern for the rest of the film).Given that Vanderbilt has a lot more experience with screen writing than he does directing, it's not surprising that he felt comfortable using spoken word alone to tell this story, but then what's the point in making it into a film? The only other way to really enhance the story through the medium would be with its music. It's too bad then that the score is totally bland and forgettable and is really more working in the background than enhancing or transforming the emotional weight of a given scene. When this film is not mediocre it is bad. It does almost nothing to utilize the medium of film and makes me question why Vanderbilt didn't just keep to the writing and leave the direction to someone more competent. Maybe if you have strong feelings on Bush you'll find yourself ignoring how bad it is. I think though, if you look at this thing objectively, you'll realize it wasn't worth your time.