So Help Me God: Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth”

It’s easy to forget that Miller never wrote about Plame at all; credit for the actual identity exposure goes to Robert Novak. Judy merely held onto her sources for principle and personal gain—trading 85 days behind bars for a recently inked Fox News contract probably wasn’t too bitter a pill. As with the real Plame controversy, Lurie deflects the main questions that situations like these should raise around the First Amendment in favor of facile grandstanding. And he’s made it easier to do so by fully coding Rachel’s actions as falling in line with a nebulous greater good. Instead of the tired national security vs. freedom of speech debate, it’d be great to have a dialogue about the implied contractual nature of the Bill of Rights, about how our Founding Fathers likely expected some reasonably responsible behavior on the part of its citizenry in return for these rights carved out from the government. This kind of complexity doesn’t make for easy or exciting cinema, and ignoring a real, hard civics lesson is an obvious choice for a political thriller. This is Lurie’s right. But that doesn’t mean we need to like the results.

We can all agree that democracy’s messy any way you cut it, and Lurie’s filmmaking certainly follows suit; on a very concrete level, there’s just more movie here than the director seems up to juggling. Like Clint Eastwood’s recent “Changeling,” “Nothing But the Truth” is crammed with enough material to form the basis of three different genre films—a courtroom drama, a high-stakes political thriller, and a sweaty tangled-hair women-in-prison flick. This kind of casserole goes down easy when the preparer is aware of the implications of the mix-and-match (see Arnaud Desplechin’s splendid “A Christmas Tale”), but not when it’s taken for granted that making unholy genre stew requires a deft hand with the ingredients. It’d almost be possible to give “Nothing But the Truth” a soft pass for providing the requisite Washington-insider drama of the season if the Coen brothers hadn’t already ruthlessly dissected the town in their underrated “Burn After Reading.”

What to take from “Nothing But the Truth,” then? How about this choice bit (sadly representative of the film’s dramatic strategies): opposing lawyers and Rachel assemble in the judge’s quarters to go over the newly produced waivers signed by all senior White House staff that release the imprisoned journalist from maintaining confidentiality. Rachel briefly scans the papers, but replaces them on the judge’s desk—she’s determined the documents to be the results of coercion and refuses the bait. Throughout, the sound of a tea kettle coming to boil. Just as tension in the room reaches its highest point, the kettle starts whistling. The judge gets up. “Would anyone like tea?” he asks. “It’s Greek.”

[Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot.  He is currently working on his first film Gerrymandering.]