So,
I’m attending the Middleburg Film Festival for the third year in a row, and I thought I would start blogging about the movies I saw. I’m not going to do reviews, or plot synopses, just my general impressions of the top of my head. So first up, the first film of the Festival , Truth.
Not a big fan of this movie. It’s a hagiography for Dan Rather and a Mary Mapes justification for her part in the CBS Bush document scandal.
The first part of the movie is just showing the audience how a news story is made. Which isn’t as interesting as the filmmakers think it is.
They do a decent job of showing how Mapes and Rather ended up running the story without enough evidence. Cate Blanchett makes Mapes likable at first. But then at the end things are revealed that make you not like Mapes and question whether she’s reliable.
And Robert Redford tries not at all to be Dan Rather. He doesn’t change his California accent to match Rather’s Texan accent and he doesn’t he even use any of Rather’s folksy sayings.
I get the point the movie is trying make, that just because there’s a flaw in a news story that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking questions. But in the end I can’t find sympathy for people who didn’t to do their job.