Truth (2015)

Just saw this film at the Toronto Film Festival. It was warmly received and was most entertaining for those cerebral enough to appreciate its exploration of the details of a deceptively controversial event in American journalism……………….However, any film with the ambitious title TRUTH should aspire towards some kind of truth beyond the trivial. To this extent the film fails miserably. On a technical level however, the screenplay being what it is, is wonderfully executed by all concerned and does provide some interesting insights into the personae of Mary Mapes and Dan Rather with the skilled performances of Cate Blanchette and Robert Redford. Any number of non trivial important questions that journalism should have covered could have been the subject of this film, where of course, 60 Minutes would never go. For example how 2 planes brought down 3 buildings and how at least 50% of Americans didn't even know there was a WTC7. Instead, the story is about whether George W avoided Vietnam through an arranged sojourn with the Texas National Guard as a pilot. Let's get real, the "surprising" fact that George W (who by 2004 was regarded as a village idiot by much of the world's media) skipped Vietnam, is a triviality tossup with Monica doing Bill, the latter of course being the subject of a greater and more expensive investigation than that of 911. For 60 Minutes. this was a most controversial subject because mainstream journalism asking hard questions by this time is long dead. After all it was Dan Rather who had a starring role in the destruction of truth and the engineered mass hypnosis following the JFK palace coup when he failed to report what he saw in the Zapruder film. What we see here on the screen is the apparent death of merely an illusion of journalism and a preoccupation with technical detail such as handwriting analysis and memo minutiae. Upon further reflection there is an outside possibility that the film on a deeper level is a sly and witty satire showing that pursuit of any kind if truth in the US is an absurd notion where so much angst and energy goes into a losing effort to disclose next to nothing.