Movie No ????: "Nothing but the Truth"

I had meant to restart this blog with a grand review of Pixar's latest wonderful film, complete with watching four other Pixar classics in the days leading up to seeing "Up." That would then be followed by short reviews of the rest of the 2009 films I've seen. I was going to leave the rest of 2008 until I hit 100 (hopefully before August).

Then I saw a film that made me so angry I had to post it.

** Note: This review contains spoilers for the film "The Contender." So if you haven't seen it in the nine years since it was released but still want to, well, you might want to skip this one. Although, trust me, you probably don't want to see it.

Rod Lurie's "Nothing but the Truth" isn't the worst film I've seen from 2008, but it might be the most infuriating. That shouldn't come as a shock, though, considering Lurie's "The Contender" got me riled up for similar reasons.

And no, they have nothing to do with the films' politics.

Lurie seems to be a master at constructing (or borrowing in the case of "Nothing but the Truth") interesting situations and then doing his darnedest to simplify anything thought-provoking and replace nuance with sermonizing.

In "The Contender," Lurie's tale began with topics examining 1) Whether the historic nature of the appointment of Joan Allen's character as the first female vice president and what it would do is more important than whether she is the best candidate, and 2) How we judge women's indiscretions differently than men's, especially in politics. It also had the possibility for a nice tug of war between politics and idealism, kind of a battle for the soul of Christian Slater's character.

Then Lurie relegates Slater's character to the sideline for extended periods of time, refuses to remove the halo above Joan Allen's character's head by having her not be guilty of the youthful sexual indiscretions but refuse to deny them simply to prove a point, and, in the most bizarre twist of all, has the other contender be guilty of a political stunt that costs a woman her life. There you go, we've eliminated potentially interesting themes, we've taken away the possibility that people might actually have to do look inside themselves and see how they'd actually feel about a female politician with a past no more sordid than many of her male counterparts, and the pesky question of whether or not she's actually the best candidate. There you go, we've led you straight to feeling exactly how we want you to about the characters. Tied a nice bow around it and everything.

It made me sick to see so much potential wasted.

"Nothing but the Truth" isn't quite as upsetting, but only because you never saw any of its actual potential on the screen. That was stripped away from this fictionalized account of the Miller/Plame case before the cameras started to roll. Most of the matters that made that case fascinating are systematically stripped away, boiling it down to the most simplistic version of the events that could be made while still having it be recognizable. Complexity, it appears, is not Lurie's friend.

It seems as though the president has ordered an air strike against Venezuela after blaming its government for an attempt on its life. A reporter (Kate Beckinsale) has learned that a CIA memo delivered to the president before he made his decision vindicated the Venezuelans. Because the agent who wrote it (Vera Farmiga) is married to a former ambassador critical of the president, her name was included in the article.

When a special prosecutor is appointed to look into who leaked the agent's identity, Beckinsale's character goes to jail rather than reveal the confidential source. And there she sits as it tears her life apart.

Gone are the questions about why the agent needed to be named in the story and the questions about whether the reporter was aiding and abetting political retribution (the ones that added a lot of shading to the Plame case). Unfortunately that's not the only thing missing. The characters feel more like symbols than people, and the dialogue seems to be 90 percent exposition, and clunky exposition at that. Even in the few places where the oratory soars, there is an air of unreality to the proceedings.

Much like the bizarre bridge stunt in "The Contender," Lurie has another eye-rolling twist of an ending. Except this time, rather than simply eliminating the moral and intellectual shadings from the film, the ending actually makes everything that preceded it simply sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even at his worst, M. Night Shyamalan's twist endings have made some thematic sense. I'd hope that Lurie was going for something more than a "gotcha" surprise with the final reveal, but I'm having a real hard time figuring out what.

Beckinsale, fresh off an absolutely stunning performance in "Snow Angels," doesn't help matters much. She is fine scene-to-scene, but at the point where the story and dialogue were falling flat, the film needed a commanding screen presence at its center. Beckinsale just doesn't show it here (coincidentally that's also been one of my biggest complaints about her small-screen doppleganger, Evangeline Lilly of "Lost"). She isn't helped, though, by the fact that her character doesn't resemble any reporter I've ever met while working at newspapers, which is especially surprising given Lurie's newspaper background.

Faring far better, and indeed the one truly great part of the movie, is Farmiga as the pseudo-Valerie Plame. The way she turned emotionally on a dime, with her character displaying whichever emotion she thought would best accomplish her objective, was stunning. It made for an interesting portrait. Unfortunately, her screen time is comparably brief, and nothing else about the film really rises to the same level.

Everything else is simply frustrating.

D