Review: Truth

Dan Rather's illustrious broadcast news career came to an inglorious end when he was forced to retire after the controversy surrounding his 60 Minutes report entitled "For the Record." The report sought to question then-president George W. Bush's military record, but the authenticity of a handful of documents, which confirmed that the president had been given preferential treatment (thus avoiding the Vietnam War), was hotly contested. Rather was the most prominent victim of the resulting fallout, but there were others who paid the price, most notably producer Mary Mapes, who has not worked in television since being terminated from her post.

Based on Mapes' 2005 memoir Truth and Duty, Truth places Mapes front and center as a tough-as-nails woman powered, though eventually undone, by the courage of her convictions. Cate Blanchett commands from her very first second - her Mapes is fiercely intelligent but also antagonistic and challenging, essential qualities for someone seeking the truth and always willing to ask the tough questions. Yet those very qualities turn against her when the unspoken alliance between corporate media and national politics comes to the fore.

Mapes was coming off breaking the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story when she set her sights on her next investigative piece: Bush's dubious military service. Mapes was not the only person interested in the topic - Bush, then in the midst of running for re-election, had swiftboated his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, whose decorated war record was in stark contrast to his own - and media outlets had been discussing it since Bush's first presidential campaign. With the go-ahead from 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard (David Lyons) and Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy (Natalie Saleeba), Mapes assembled her core investigative team: ex-military and Pentagon man Colonel Roger Charles (Dennis Quaid), freelancer Mike Smith (Topher Grace), and journalism professor Lucy Scott (Elisabeth Moss).

As with his screenplay for David Fincher's Zodiac, director James Vanderbilt painstakingly details the procedural process as the team pore over the paperwork and, mindful that the results of their investigation could influence the election, are careful to validate every iota of information and evidence. This is for 60 Minutes, after all, the gold standard for journalistic integrity in an industry less and less inclined to fund serious news investigations and being taken over by the burgeoning online reporters, the majority of whom don't exactly adhere to the strictest of standards.

Determined to break the story before the competition gets a whiff of it, Mapes agrees to the earliest available time slot, which means that she and her team have five days to ensure their findings are airtight. Had the presidential election not been around the corner, perhaps Mapes would have considered a later air date. Perhaps a later air date would have allowed for better scrutiny of the documents which confirmed, in no uncertain terms, that Bush's military attendance was practically non-existent and that he hardly fulfilled any of his obligations as an officer. Perhaps there would have been time to explore the superscript "th," a feature experts would point out could not have been produced on a '70s-era mechanical typewriter. Perhaps Mapes would have taken more steps to get confirmation of the documents' content on-camera rather than obtaining it over the phone.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. It doesn't matter that the crux of the story was essentially solid. What matters to the other major news outlets is that CBS is now a target, and what matters to the CBS News higher-ups is finding someone to blame. That someone was Mapes. She had, after all, come up with the story and put it together. She was the one that deemed her sources and all the evidence acceptable. Never mind that Mapes and her team had proven the superscript "th" was possible on typewriters of that period and earlier. The damage had been done and no amount of facts could repair the public's perception. CBS was not about to protect one or any of its own if the current and future administration threatened the corporate interests of the network or its parent company, Viacom. And so Mapes, Rather, and all those involved were raked over the coals.

Truth is not without its moments of pontificating, both subtle (Rather lamenting the rise of the blogospheres) and melodramatic (Mike Smith's conspiracy theory outburst), but Vanderbilt generally maintains an even-keeled intensity. The film is firmly on Mapes' side, though with Blanchett's gripping portrayal, it's difficult not to be on anyone's side but hers. Her unraveling is spectacular to witness - one could swear that physical manifestations of her emotional wounds were visible. Robert Redford as Rather is magnetic, though the film's lionisation of Rather in its final moments feels off-key considering how he has mostly been a peripheral figure.

Truth

Directed by: James Vanderbilt

Written by: James Vanderbilt; based on the memoir Truth and Duty by Mary Mapes

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood, Stacy Keach, John Benjamin Hickey, David Lyons, Dermot Mulroney, Rachael Blake, Andrew McFarlane, Natalie Saleeba