‘True Story’ has some very real flaws
Story is intriguing, but acting, subplots feel contrived
True Story is the name of the film, but fabrications are at the heart of this dispassionate crime tale.
The premise of the spellbinding story is killer: An accused murderer assumes the identity of a reporter, and an unlikely bromance forms.
So why does director Rupert Goold shoehorn contrivances to amplify the drama? The powerful real-life story is provocative enough on its own. Jonah Hill plays disgraced New
York Times reporter Michael Finkel, and James Franco is Christian Longo, a manipulative charmer charged with murdering his wife and three children.
Neither character is likable, and both have questionable relationships with the truth, so seeing their identities merge seems somehow fitting.
Finkel was a star investigative reporter, but he plays fast and loose with essential facts in a story on African child slavery and loses his job. He heads home to brood in Montana, where he all but ignores his loving partner, Jill (Felicity Jones), and pitches writing assignments that go nowhere.
Longo is a shady Oregon businessman charged with the brutal crimes. Finkel gets a call from a reporter who tells him that Longo was nabbed by police and was using Finkel’s name as an alias.
Intrigued, Finkel arranges a jailhouse interview. The wily accused killer knows how to play to Finkel’s ego. He fawns and tells him, “I’ve followed your whole career.”
Finkel is hooked. He feels a kinship with this outcast. And, given his journalistic skills, he thinks he can ferret out the truth behind the killings of Longo’s wife and children.
For a reporter, he’s surprisingly gullible and unaware of how he’s being used.
Perhaps the image of a best seller colors his vision: The film is based on Finkel’s eponymous 2005 memoir/mea culpa (his words).
Interactions between Hill and Franco don’t elicit the requisite queasy tension. Their dramatic rhythm is off, making for surprisingly lackluster scenes.
Franco has flashes of chilling manipulation as an enigmatic sociopath, and Hill hints at his character’s underlying despair, but neither is convincing enough. The story might have been better served with less recognizable actors in the key roles. Both have established themselves as strong dramatic actors. But Hill and Franco also starred in the raucous 2013 stoner comedy This Is the End, and at times their amiable low-key interactions here seem about to drift over into a buddy comedy.
Marco Beltrami’s evocative score adds melancholy depth.
Working against the story are a series of heavy-handed flashbacks and a subplot involving Jill. Last seen as Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Jones is a terrific actress. But an implausible face-to-face meeting between her and Longo, in which she tells him off while playing a recording of an aria, feels overly theatrical. True Story is director Goold’s feature film debut, and his background as a stage director is evident in this scene and others.
True Story is an intrinsically fascinating and occasionally riveting tale marred by unnecessary embellishments.