2.5/4 Stars
Rated R
Starring: Jonah Hill and James Franco
Directed by Rupert Goold
If you are a hotshot journalist and are caught confabulating a story, it’s a long fall from grace. That is the initial plot element propelling True Story.
The film is inspired by a true story. Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill) had been an ambitious freelancer for the New York Times and has relations with Christian Longo (James Franco), accused of killing his wife and three children in a particularly chilling manner.
As the film opens in 2001, Finkel has just returned from an assignment in Africa. He’s cranked out a story about Youssouf Malé, an adolescent worker who migrated from Mali to work on a cocoa plantation on the Ivory Coast. According to Finkel’s article, Malé had toiled as a picker for a year and earned a paltry $102 for his labors. “Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?” became a lead story in The New York Times Magazine, replete with a haunting photograph of Malé on the cover. It’s quite a coup for Finkel.
Problem: Finkel has committed some serious journalistic transgressions. The uncaptioned photo on the cover wasn’t Malé but another lad, Madou Traoré. In reality, Malé had left the Ivory Coast after only a month and returned to his home. Finkel had created a composite character.
Michael is hauled in for a tense meeting with his supervisor and a higher-ranking editor. Confronted by his bosses, Finkel expresses no contrition. Instead, he tries to defend his actions with various rationalizations. According to Finkel, the story is basically the truth. He contends that he has simply extrapolated from multiple sources and merged them into a single character. Finkel contends he was just enhancing the story in an effort to bring more attention to the plight of these impoverished young workers. What’s the harm in that?
Of course, Finkel’s bosses reject his sophistry. They tell Finkel that he won’t be receiving any more assignments. Over Finkel’s pleas, the publication posts a lengthy retraction of his cover story. It delineates Finkel’s journalistic lapses in excruciating detail.
Finkel’s career seems to be over until he learns the lurid details about Longo. The Oregon resident is accused of having strangled his wife and infant son. Then, he supposedly killed his two older children. Prosecutors contend that Longo placed each of them, alive, into a bag, which was weighed down by rocks, then threw them off a bridge into an icy river. They were both drowned.
When Longo was arrested by the FBI in Mexico, he was using Finkel’s name as an alias and pretending to be him. Imagine if you discovered that someone, who was accused of multiple, gruesome murders, had appropriated your identity. Wouldn’t it throw you for a loop? Instead, Finkel sees this development as a providential twist of fate. Could this be the break that he needs to pave his way back into journalism?
True Story is helmed by highly regarded theater director Rupert Goold. His expertise as a stage director does not translate into the cinematic format. True Story has a distinctly cold feel.
Ultimately, the biggest problem is its source material. The screenplay by Goold and David Kajganich is drawn from Finkel’s self-serving memoir. Are we to accept the perspective of someone who concocted a bogus news story, then entered into a dubious relationship with an accused child killer? The adaptation gratuitously interjects an apocryphal incident into the text of the film. It depicts Finkel’s fiancée meeting with Longo in prison. However, the encounter never happened.
True Story is a film, which supposedly explores the importance of verisimilitude. Unfortunately, the film skirts the truth.
