Two negatives don’t make a positive in True Story
Film’s pedestrian approach to New York Times drama makes for a less-than-gripping tale
The grammarian’s no-no about using double negatives figures into Jonah Hill’s schooling of James Franco in True Story, a fact-based drama pairing a journalist and accused murderer. The movie should have heeded its own lesson. Neither Hill’s Michael Finkel, a disgraced former New York Times reporter, nor Franco’s Christian Longo, an Oregon man charged with killing his wife and three children, can be viewed in a positive light.
They’re both negatives, in other words, which de- flates the film like a slow leak to a balloon. It’s not that sympathetic or likeable characters are required — director and cowriter Rupert Goold is wise not to try to force this — but the story as presented leaves little reason to care about the outcome.
Goold and co-writer David Kajganich, working from Finkel’s 2005 memoir, provide the bare facts of the tale while skirting speculation as to motivations, especially on the part of Longo.
It seems they were trying to avoid falling into the same trap of factual embellishment that in 2002 ended the Times career of Finkel, a star writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine.
He was fired after admitting to inventing a composite character for a 2001cover story exposé about exploited Ivory Coast plantation workers.
Holed up in his Montana retreat with his partner, Jill (Felicity Jones), he’s unsure of what to do next. Then a journalist calls to tell him that Longo has been discovered using Finkel’s identity in Mexico, just prior to being apprehended, and what does Finkel think about this?
There are many possible directions this strange scenario could take, including the irony of one fabulist exploiting another and the difficulties of protecting identity in the brave new online world.
Instead, Goold goes in for a more pedestrian approach: a cat-and-mouse game where neither the cat nor the mouse holds much interest.
The disgraced journalist confronts the accused killer, trading writing lessons — Longo’s an aspiring scribe — for what he hopes will be a career-saving scoop about what Longo did or didn’t do to his family. Murder scenes are kept deliberately and mercifully opaque.
Hill and Franco have teamed before, in the ensemble apocalyptic comedy This Is the End. But the sparks they struck in comic terms aren’t rekindled in this dreary dramatic setting, much of which is shot in a jailhouse or courtroom. Hill’s selfpitying Finkel is far too credulous, especially since Franco’s manipulative Longo clearly can’t be believed.
It’s only when Jones’ underused Jill explodes in anger that True Story jolts into some semblance of life. But by then this story is long past being over.