True Story is a 2015 biographical drama about a disgraced New York Times reporter who meets with an accused killer, who has taken his identity.
Michael Finkel is a New York Times journalist, who runs afoul in his career when a cover story for the magazine proves his work wasn’t entirely honest. After losing his job and basically becoming a pariah in the industry, something very strange happens. He learns that a man on the run for killing his young family and then hiding out in Mexico was using his name. That’s new. Thinking it a story that might redeem his credibility, Finkel then contacts the accused, a man named Christian Longo, and visits him in prison as he awaits trial, working a deal that gives him exclusive access for a book. But is what Longo telling him true or is he setting up the vulnerable writer in garnering wider sympathy?
Directed by Rupert Goold and based on the book of the same name by Finkel, True Story is sort of a disappointment, not exactly creating the dynamic back forth between the two leads it seems primed to be. All you need to do is look back at Jonathan Demme‘s Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs to know how it’s done right, pitting good versus evil around a ticking clock. Here, it’s simply two guys who sit across from each other in a sterile white prison conference room and talk. It’s not that is lacks interest. It just doesn’t have any umph.
Jonah Hill plays Finkel, a smart and dedicated journalist who makes a bad call in his latest story, damaging his reputation and that of the esteemed magazine. It leaves him adrift in his mountain home with his devoted wife Jill (Felicity Jones), who does her best to support him through a tough time. It’s not easy.
James Franco is Longo, a stoic, sociopath who gets caught in Mexico with authorities chasing him across the border. He’s brought into custody without incident and his exemplary behavior earns his the right to meet with Finkel.
And it’s this good behavior that sort of sucks the suspense out of the story, Longo a polite, always gentle guy who just sort of sits there blank-faced as Finkel questions him. Most in this genre make efforts to give the accused killer a knowing edginess that keeps the viewer in a state of uncertainty, and while True Story makes a soft swipe at this in the beginning, it eventually falls to the wayside and becomes simply a talking exercise in manipulation. Both Hill and Franco are quiet and stripped of any emotion, the film trying to establish this sort of genius versus genius mentality that just never feels earned.
Thankfully, there’s Jill. Jones plays the exasperated wife with all the thanklessness the role seems destined to have, appearing on screen only when Finkel seems at his most down, she staring off into the distance in wonder about what her husband is doing and how far down the rabbit hole he’s gone. It’s all rather rudimentary until the night Longo call the house and reaches Jill instead of Mike.
The scene is mostly meant to conjure a bit more of the fright that never actually comes to fruition, but is, even if it’s overly dramatized, effective in literally boxing the woman into a mindset of helplessness. As Longo talks in his methodically complimentary tone, we follow Jill as she slips from one room to the next, closing the glass doors behind her, metaphorically closing herself off and by extension, entangling herself into his little web. That’s his plan of course, trying to use her to keep Mike on his side. Guess what? It ain’t happening.
What follows is the film’s best moment when Jill actually shows up at the prison and lowers the boom on Longo in a scene that is set up to have him drag her into his hell only to have her instead spin the tables and snap him into place. Calling him out for what he is, Jill is fearless in her takedown and while the film keeps trying to poke the bear as it were in trying to have us think he might crack and leap across the table at her throat, that’s not the point. This instead becomes the whole reason for why the film exists, revealing that the manipulation of Finkel serves only to give greater voice to women, both the victim and, by the end, hero of the story.
The moment is surely fictionalized for the sake of the film but is the most creative, with Jill playing for Longo a recording on her phone of a piece of music by Italian renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, explaining that the somber piece is both beautiful and deceiving because it was written by a man who murdered his wife, her lover and their child. It’s not too hard to draw a line from there and the symbolism becomes clear, written on Longo’s face. It saps the color and the bite from the killer and leaves him (and us) with something more to think about. It’s a great movie moment.