Truth
Directed by:
James VanderbiltScreenplay:
James VanderbiltCinematography:
Mandy WalkerComposer:
Brian TylerCast:
Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss, Dennis Quaid, Bruce Greenwood, John Benjamin Hickey, Martin Sacks, David Lyons, Rachael Blake (more)Plots(1)
On the morning of September 9, 2004, veteran CBS News producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) believed she had every reason to feel proud of a broadcast journalism job well done. By the end of the day, Mapes, CBS News, and the venerable CBS News anchor Dab Rather (Robert Redford) would be under harsh scrutiny. The evening before, 60 Minutes II had aired an investigative report, produced by Mapes and reported on-air by Rather, that purported to reveal new evidence proving that President George W. Bush had possibly shirked his duty during his service as a Texas Air National Guard pilot from 1968 to 1974. The piece asserted that George W. Bush had not only exploited family connections and political privilege to avoid the Vietnam War by joining the Texas Air National Guard, but he had failed for many months to fulfill his most basic Guard obligation—showing up on base.
Mapes and her team of researchers had scrambled under a tight deadline to pull together both on- air eyewitness testimony and newly-disclosed documents to make their case, and they felt confident that their story was solid. In the lead-up to the 2004 Bush v. Kerry presidential election, the "Bush-Guard" story could have had profound ramifications. But within days after the story broke, George W. Bush's military service record was no longer the focus of media and public scrutiny. Instead, it was 60 Minutes, Mapes, and Rather who were under question: the documents supporting their investigation were denounced as forgeries, and the 60 Minutes staff was accused of shoddy journalism or, perhaps worse, accused of being duped. Eventually, Mapes would lose her job and reputation. Dan Rather would step down prematurely as CBS News anchor.
How did attention end up focused on the journalists who questioned the official version of the story? How did the minutiae of document typefaces, line breaks, and superscripts become seemingly more important to the national discourse than the question of whether the President had failed to fulfill his military obligations? Have journalistic integrity and independence been fundamentally altered in today's newsrooms and boardrooms? (Warner Bros. UK)
(more)Reviews (4)
I had no idea that during the presidency of George Bush, America dealt with the things they dealt with in this movie. Interesting. The movie shows the painstaking work of certain journalists and even though it can look boring at first the movie is nothing like that. That’s certainly because of the good directing work but also A-list actors which this movie is full of. The best of all of them is without a doubt Cate Blanchett, who seems perfectly unaffected, just like Elizabeth Moss. Interesting piece of movie-writing, it is almost surprising that this came from America.
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Of last year's trinity of meeting-room-true-events-drama, which includes Oscar-winning Spotlight and the apt Big Short, Truth whizzed through American cinemas to the least acclaim and no nominations, which is a bit unfair because it complements the other two nominated films in the trio perfectly. While the party bus through America's credit crisis conceived of the subject matter as an amoral trip, Spotlight appeals to mainstream audiences with its themes of old-school journalism and the "safe controversy" of pedophile priests while Truth does the best job of depicting in as much detail as possible the fact that if you want to expose the truth to the world, you need to deal with every even if self-serving detail. Thus, the big emotions and grandiose music can be humorous, underlining the fact that the film "just" has the characters figuring out if it was possible to write a the after the number in ‘78, essentially addressing primarily things that other adaptations skip over with montages. Along with the depressing denouement, it breaks down a bit the illusion of the bold journalistic dinosaurs we're supposed to be grateful to for policing democracy for us by actually watching journalists who simply screwed up, no matter how brilliant their motivations were. Despite this, however, we feel sympathy for them because we are not evaluating their results, but their work and dedication, which we believe is already alien to contemporary journalism. Plus of course anti-Bushism, but that isn’t so much a question of opinion as of good upbringing.
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The US may be democratic through and through, but there is a limit to everything. No one dare disrespect Mr. President, or there will be hell to pay! Truth is an extremely intriguing drama about the plight of the free press in a country that will gladly teach the Greeks that the word democracy comes from the American language. A well-written screenplay, Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford as the leads – an intimate drama, which was way more engaging than I’d expected it to be.
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Robert Redford is such a great actor that you simply devour every second he is on the screen. There isn't as much of him as you would have liked, but Cate Blanchett surprised me with an incredibly natural yet heartfelt performance that I enjoyed. She grabs your attention and allows the story of a woman who was just trying to uncover something she believed to be true to shine. The world will reward her for that, that's for sure.
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