Cate takes aim at Dubya and misses by a mile
HARD on the heels of Spotlight winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, here’s another film about investigative journalism.
One difference is that the reporters in Spotlight got their facts right (about the protection of child-abusing priests by the Catholic Church) and those in Truth don’t.
Writer-director James Vanderbilt’s film chronicles the events in 2004 that led to US TV network CBS firing a highly regarded producer, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett), and more seismically, to the resignation of her celebrated friend and colleague, anchorman Dan Rather (Robert Redford).
On September 8 that year, the CBS current affairs show 60 Minutes, fronted by Rather,
broke a shocking story. It alleged that President George W. Bush, who was running for re-election, had shirked his service in the Texas Air National Guard between 1968 and 1974.
Dubya had ended up doing pilot training in the National Guard instead of fighting in the Vietnam War.
He was part of the Guard’s ‘champagne unit so named because it sheltered members of the Dallas Cowboys football team, and the privileged sons of powerful, well-conneted men, such as George Bush Snr.
But 60 Minutes had found memos referring to a different kind of string-pulling.
George W, they claimed, had failed to discharge his most basic duties in the National Guard, hardly even bothering to turn up on base.
These were explosive allegations. Not only had the President body-swerved Vietnam, it seemed he hadn’t even taken the much cushier alternative very seriously.
Rather and his dogged producer Mapes were delighted with their scoop, yet soon found their own journalistic integrity in the dock.
Within days of the broadcast, it emerged t hat t he photocopied documents underpinning the entire story were probably forged.
The burning question was not whether George W. Bush had or hadn’t made a mockery of his military service; it was whether Mapes, Rather and their 60 Minutes colleagues were agenda-driven Lefties, actively scheming to tarnish a Republican president in election year, or were simply so excited with their story that they had failed to check it properly.
Were they guilty of politically motivated malice or ineptitude? Either way, they had made a catastrophic mistake, and to the unconcealed glee of their rivals, the scandal almost inevitably known as ‘Rathergate’ caused CBS huge embarrassment.
Vanderbilt tells his story well enough, aided by a spirited performance from Blanchett, while Redford, so badly miscast as Bill Bryson in last year’s creaky A Walk In The Woods, is exactly right as Rather.
He is avuncular and charismatic, and this time the right kind of creaky, even walking around a desk like a great national monument might if it could move.
But the film is disingenuous, straining far too hard to present Mapes and Rather as heroic liberals victimised by an institution more worried about its relationship with the White House than with its own journalists.
Did they commit an almighty blunder or not? If the film itself isn’t sure, then how can we be?