Serious journalists take themselves a lot more seriously in the United States than serious journalists take themselves here. So many of them hope to become Carl Woodward one day. In this part of the world, the average newspaper person feels grateful if they can avoid becoming one of the pigs in Spitting Image.
We shouldn't gripe. Standards of journalism tend to be impressively rigorous at the upper end of US media. The downside is the hysterical palaver we encounter when somebody tells even the tiniest porky pie in the New York Times. Just have a glance at True Story.
The film begins with the revelation that Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill), a foreign correspondent of some standing, conflated sources to create a composite character in a story on the African slave trade for the New York Times. So seriously does the film take Finkel's shame that it invites him to set his crimes against the alleged actions of a slick huckster who may have murdered his whole family.
Following his sacking, Finkel, who doesn't appear to be short of money, makes for a nicely appointed wood cabin with a shamefully underwritten wife (played by Felicity Jones, who couldn't be more wasted if she were playing a tree). Nobody will hire him because of those porky pies in the Times. Then Finkel runs up against a bizarre story.
A man named Christian Longo (James Franco) has been arrested for the murder of his wife and children in Oregon. The twist is that, while hiding in Mexico, Longo took on Finkel’s identity.
The journalist travels to the accused man’s prison cell and they strike up an uneasy friendship. Longo does look to be bang to rights, but he is, at first, unwilling to address his own guilt or innocence. Nonetheless, Finkel manages to sell a book-length account of Longo’s story to a major publisher.
The film-makers are, we must assume, aware of Janet Malcolm's famous treatise The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she described somebody in Finkel's position as being "a kind of confidence man". The cons of newspaper people are, however, mere diversions when set beside the outrages available to film-makers.
The writer can tease and undermine. The director can cast a matinee idol such as James Franco to make something inappropriately glamorous of an apparent psychopath. This is one of Franco’s lazier performances, but the drawl, the crooked smile and the scrunched eyes look to be flogging material no decent filmgoer should want to buy.
Through it all, Hill, a decent straight actor, can’t make sense of the film’s crazily skewed personal dynamics. Franco isn’t sufficiently charming to explain Longo’s apparent hold over Finkel. A clunky plot device fails to offer him a believable moral dilemma. The continuing insistence that the journalist is grappling with similar demons to those that assail the alleged murderer would be funny if it weren’t mildly offensive.
For all that, True Story works well as an upmarket true-crime thriller. Think of it as a feature-length version of Law & Order and you will pass the time tolerably well. Enough information is held back to keep the audience guessing until the last 20 minutes. The courtroom scenes spring a few shameless dramatic convulsions.
True Story is, nonetheless, a most unexpected film to encounter at the head of Rupert Goold's directing CV. The British theatre director, best know for a robust Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart, could surely have found something more worthy of his undoubted talents. Or is this the best that gets offered to "legit" directors these days? It's not worth taking seriously.
