There is a sliding scale of effectiveness for movies based on true stories. At the upper end are films like Lawrence of Arabia, Goodfellas or City of God, where gifted artists at the top of their game have found meaning and inspiration in someone else’s life and have bent the facts in order to get at some larger truth; even if these events hadn’t actually transpired, they would still be excellent films. In the middle are movies that sink or swim by virtue of how interesting the story is, where craftsmanship takes a backseat to narrative. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, which can work wonders but then the story had better be dang interesting to make up the difference, like Shattered Glass but unlike The Bling Ring.
At the bottom we find Rupert Goold’s True Story and its ilk, which take an otherwise fascinating series of events and mold them around genre conventions rather than the other way around. Going into this film, I had little to no idea of what actually happened in the saga of former New York Times journalist Mike Finkel and then-accused (later convicted) killer Christian Longo, yet I still managed to predict every twist and turn because it’s told with about as much depth as an episode of “Law & Order.”
Jonah Hill plays Finkel, a celebrated journalist who is fired and publicly shunned for fudging the facts for a high-profile story where he combined the stories of several de facto child slaves of a plantation in Africa and presented them as having happened to one boy instead of many. At a time when no one is answering his calls, he hears of Christian Longo (James Franco), a recently apprehended fugitive who had pretended to be Finkel in Mexico while evading capture over the killing of his family. Finkel begins to meet with the charismatic Longo as he awaits trial to discover the truth about Longo’s crime in exchange for sharing everything he knows about writing and storytelling.
A film-worthy story, indeed, but trouble sets in almost as soon as we witness the first meeting between Finkel and Longo. We’re told that the men see something in one another, that there is an eerie connection between the two beyond the circumstances of Longo’s capture. While both lead performances are noteworthy, the characterizations are far too uneven to be the focus. Franco gives Longo an impressive stare; so impressive, in fact, that the film is unable to build suspense because we already know within minutes not to trust this man. Finkel’s initial deception is fine as a plot point, but the self-serving nature of his ambition is almost totally unexamined. There’s no real arc to Finkel’s journey, just a series of emotions (well-executed by Hill, it’s worth noting), while Longo practically sweats foreshadowing. Absolutely zero suspense is built into their relationship, the supporting characters are confusingly placed and the supposed big reveals are visible from miles away.
Director Goold’s celebrated background in theater is on full display in his ability to elicit performances, but the movie itself never feels like more than a series of well-executed acting exercises. Since it’s already directed like a play, maybe this film should be repurposed for the stage as three extended conversations that show the evolution of both men, because as it stands, there’s nothing to be found in True Story that a night of vigorous Wikipedia surfing couldn’t uncover.
Playing this week
Child 44
Cinderella
The Divergent Series: Insurgent
Furious 7
Get Hard
Home
The Longest Ride
Monkey Kingdom
Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
Unfriended
Woman in Gold
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213
