James Vanderbilt (2015)
In the late summer of 2004, journalists on CBS’s flagship news programme 60 Minutes received documents concerning George W Bush’s record of service with the Texas Air National Guard. Questions about whether Bush joined the Guard to avoid service in Vietnam had been circulating for some time. The ‘Killian documents’ that came CBS’s way indicated that, after failing to meet minimal training and performance requirements, Bush had been declared unfit for duty and suspended from service during 1972. The documents were verified to the satisfaction of both the producer of 60 Minutes and CBS’s much-respected veteran anchor, Dan Rather. The programme ran the Killian documents story in the first week of September, just two months before the US presidential election in which Bush was standing for re-election. Within hours, the authenticity of the key documentation was being questioned. Rather and his colleagues continued to insist that the documents were genuine; but once it became clear that their source, a former Texas Army National Guard Officer, had misled the 60 Minutes team in what he originally told them, CBS senior management was no longer prepared to vouch for the authenticity of the material. Rather made an on-air apology for the way in which it had been used and CBS set up a panel to investigate the handling of the story. The panel completed its work after the presidential election had taken place. The findings of its report led to the resignation or firing of four producers. Dan Rather’s decision to step down as the 60 Minutes anchor was seen as another consequence of the controversy. He left the programme in early 2005, shortly after George W Bush’s inauguration for a second presidential term.
Truth, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, is a dramatised account of these events. In the opening scene, the camera moves down from a great (pointless) height into a waiting area in a smart office building – there to reveal a woman (Cate Blanchett), who sits knitting, intensely. A receptionist tells her, ‘Mr Hibey will see you now’. In his office, Dick Hibey (Andrew McFarlane) expresses mild, affable surprise that the woman knits. In response, she bites his head off, asking with scathing sarcasm if he thinks this doesn’t go with her radical, feminist image. The woman is Mary Mapes, one of the 60 Minutes producers at the eye of the Killian documents storm. Hibey is a high-profile New York lawyer. They are meeting to discuss the possibility of his acting as her legal adviser at the forthcoming CBS review panel. After his unfortunate opening conversational gambit, Hibey makes cautious attempts to pacify Mapes but she stays spiky. He must be grateful when a flashback arrives to interrupt the chat by telling us the story so far. This flashback accounts for a large part of Truth’s 125 minutes.
When Hibey eventually accompanies Mapes to her interview with the review panel, the lawyer, before questioning gets underway, queries the absence of a stenographer. The panel chair assures him there’s no need for one, that the proceedings are ‘informal’. Hibey doesn’t look entirely satisfied by this – as well as he might not. James Vanderbilt has made clear that the composition of the panel is emphatically conservative and means us to think that they’re therefore capable of every kind of skulduggery. It’s highly unlikely that, in the early twenty-first century, a panel of inquiry set up by a national broadcasting company in North America could have got away with making no record of its proceedings – when jobs (senior jobs, at that) were on the line. It’s incredible that, if this was how it operated, such a panel would allow those whom it interviewed to have a hot-shot lawyer at their side. Hibey doesn’t protest further. The panel must be as relieved that he turns out to be a largely silent partner to Mapes as she must be furious that she presumably paid good money to have him fight her corner. (Dan Rather (Robert Redford), as soon as he could see what was coming, gave her Hibey’s card.) Yet this frequently choleric woman doesn’t bat an eyelid either: Hibey has coached her not to rise to the bait under questioning but she doesn’t even have a go at him in private for putting up such a poor show. Truth contains another mystery the seeds of which are also sown in that prologue at Hibey’s office. We often see Mary Mapes, as well as at work, at home with her husband (John Benjamin Hickey) and young son (Connor Burke) but she never again picks up those knitting needles. Were we meant to see her as a tricoteuse, anticipating her own head rolling after the CBS review?
It might have helped Cate Blanchett to be able to knit more. It would have given her something else to do with her hands, as well as repeatedly run them through her hair, tensely take her glasses on and off, and furiously scribble down notes. Blanchett’s portrait of Mary Mapes is reminiscent of some of Meryl Streep’s less successful performances – a case of a great actress nailing a thinly-written starring role so instantly that there’s soon nothing much more she can do, other than repeat (as Blanchett does here) or try out extra mannerisms (Streep’s usual preference). We quickly get that Mary Mapes is competitively good at her job at CBS and knows it – so much so that she’s a pain in the neck and you unworthily feel she deserves whatever’s coming to her. It’s fortunate for Cate Blanchett that, once the Killian documents story starts to backfire on Mary Mapes, she gets the chance to alternate between fierce freedom-of-speechifying and falling to bits emotionally. She does the latter thanks chiefly to the reactionary bastard of a father who physically abused Mapes as a child. This side of the character isn’t convincing, though. When claims that the documents are fake start circulating on right-wing blogs, the comments are couched in characteristically charming language. Mapes is horrified by the nasty remarks about her looks (remarks which Blanchett’s beauty overpoweringly contradicts) and terrified by bloggers’ threats of violence against her. It’s hard to credit that, father-ridden as she’s presented as being, a senior journalist of Mapes’s standing wouldn’t have grown a thicker skin. I enjoyed watching Cate Blanchett’s commanding presence and technique in Truth but that’s surely not what this foolishly earnest movie intends us to be compelled by.
Robert Redford does a decent job as Dan Rather but the effect is at least doubly hagiographic. Redford seems to want to pay homage to Rather as an icon of journalistic integrity. James Vanderbilt wants to follow suit and do honour to Redford – both as a figure of equivalent standing in the film world and, thanks to All the President’s Men, movie history’s embodiment of an investigative press crusader. Redford will be eighty later this year and Alan J Pakula’s film will be forty: there’s a strong nostalgic-cum-elegiac element to the image that Redford presents here. His face is eloquent, through a combination of his advancing years (he looks ghastly when Rather’s in TV make-up) and his undiminished ability to express plenty through small but incisive facial movements. The sequence in which Rather phones Mapes to tell her he’s leaving 60 Minutes isn’t well done, though. It’s hard to work out if it’s badly conceived or botched in execution (perhaps it’s both). When he starts the conversation, Rather tells Mapes that he’s had a few drinks; he then delivers a speech about the glorious past of television news broadcasting, before dropping what he knows will be a bombshell for a colleague who thinks the world of him (and may see him as an idealised father-figure). Redford doesn’t get across the sense of Rather’s uncertainty about how to deliver the difficult news.
This is the first feature that James Vanderbilt has directed as well as written for cinema. (His screenplay credits include David Fincher’s Zodiac and, more recently, The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel.) It’s not an auspicious debut – Truth features some poor sequencing and feeble staging. One of the arguments about the authenticity of the Killian documents concerns the appearance of superscript ’th’ in one of them and whether any typewriters in the early 1970s had a superscript facility. Vanderbilt has one of the CBS news bosses angrily demand that the 60 Minutes team ‘find me another goddamn ‘th’’ then cuts immediately to the journalists unpacking more documents to scour and one of them (Dennis Quaid) saying, as the first line of the scene, ‘We’ve gotta find another ‘th’’. When Mike Smith (Topher Grace), a younger member of the team, comes into the newsroom shortly before giving evidence to the review panel, he’s asked to leave the premises and protests vehemently about the politically motivated stitch-up over which CBS management is presiding. All the other workers in the open-plan office stare stupidly at Mike for the duration of his lengthy tirade. It seemed to me more likely they’d have looked down in embarrassment – as I felt like doing, out of embarrassment for Topher Grace being required to do this speech. These office gawpers are presumably the same people who, later on, jokily and volubly fete one of the other producers who’s forced to resign (Elisabeth Moss). Vanderbilt should also have used much less of Brian Tyler’s obvious, pompous music.
The fundamental weaknesses of Truth lie in the screenplay. Vanderbilt’s source material is Mary Mapes’s 2005 memoir, Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power. You wouldn’t expect Mapes herself to be impartial but that needn’t have precluded a more objective movie treatment. It’s worth comparing Truth with Doug Liman’s Fair Game (2010). That film, which dealt with political events nearly contemporary with those of Truth, was also based on the memoir of the wronged woman who became the screen protagonist (Valerie Plame’s Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House). But Jez and John Butterworth’s screenplay and Liman’s direction were much more nuanced (with the result that the main characters were more sympathetic than they are in Truth). James Vanderbilt seems rather to have exploited Mary Mapes’s understandably partisan account in order to express his own political bias. In taking this line, he fudges the question of whether Mapes and her colleagues were guilty of poor journalistic practice. As far as I could tell from the film, Mapes was inclined to assume too quickly that Bush was guilty, that she settled for selective authentication of the documents. There’s plenty of detail on the verification process (it’s absorbing if, like me, you’re interested in keyboard evolution etc) but Vanderbilt then ignores the implications of what he shows. At the end of the film, he tells us that Mary Mapes’s breaking the story of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal won CBS, after they’d fired her, a coveted Peabody Award and that Mapes’s work on Abu Ghraib is considered to be one of the outstanding pieces of journalism of the first decade of this century. We’re meant to think this makes CBS’s treatment of Mapes all the more outrageous, even though it’s obviously irrelevant to her handling of the Killian tapes story.
At the panel hearing, Mary Mapes keeps a lid on things, as Dick Hibey advises her to do, until her grilling is over. The panel members are gathering up their papers when she pipes up, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me about my political views – like you’ve asked all my colleagues about my political views?’ (She knows this from Mike Smith and others.) An exchange of angry soundbites inevitably follows. This self-destructive postscript is more dramatically required than it’s credible but it’s revealing of James Vanderbilt’s politically simple-minded approach to the material. Underlying the matter of George W Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard is the Vietnam draft-dodging issue – did Bush use his father’s influence to get a safe berth in Texas rather than fight in Asia? One of the panel members asks Mapes if she can’t believe that at least some sons of the rich and influential were accepted onto the Air National Guard on their own merits rather than as a result of string-pulling. Mapes pauses before replying, in a tone of ardent dignity, ‘No, sir, I can’t’. Why would she make such an admission of blinkered bias? Why wouldn’t she say, ‘I believe some of them may have got in on merit but that there’s evidence that others had strings pulled on their behalf’?
Truth was released in the US three weeks before Spotlight. Tom McCarthy’s movie cost twice as much to make as James Vanderbilt’s; at present, Spotlight has take twenty times more than Truth at the box office, as well as winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Just desserts: whatever the limitations of McCarthy’s film, it manages to celebrate the virtues of investigative journalism without the grandstanding in which Truth repeatedly indulges. One of the few consolations of Vanderbilt’s movie is that some of his actors deliver more balanced characterisations than the script supplies (or, perhaps, the director intends): Stacy Keach as Bill Burkett, the source for CBS’s story; Dermot Mulroney, as the review panel chair; David Lyons, as Josh Howard, Mapes’s immediate boss in the newsroom; and, especially, the reliably subtle and incisive Bruce Greenwood, as the CBS News President, Andrew Heyward. You come out of Truth wondering what CBS has made of it. They evidently think it’s a travesty (and decided not to advertise the movie). That doesn’t prove the case against the film, of course, but it doesn’t need to. James Vanderbilt has already done that. He’s made a movie that does little more than pander to political prejudices – conservative as well as liberal, since Vanderbilt supplies the former with the grounds for deploring liberal bias in the film-making. His Truth is not stranger than fiction but clumsily and thoroughly unbelievable.
9 March 2016
