When I go to review a new movie, I usually know more-or-less what I’m going to see. Generally the only information I expose myself to before seeing a film is whatever was in the press release and what was in the film’s first trailer. This is typically enough to give me a basic impression of what the film is about (although sometimes that impression ends up being completely wrong, such as with Inherent Vice). Rarely though do I go into a screening with absolutely no idea of what to expect; that happened this week with True Story. After reading the press release for the film and watching the trailer, I discovered the film starred both Jonah Hill and James Franco (yes, the guys respectively from The Wolf of Wall Street and The Interview) in serious, dramatic roles; this both intrigued and confused me, and so I didn’t really know what I was going to be watching. As it turns out, True Story is something of an enigma itself, never quite sure of what it wants to be or where it wants to go.
The movie begins with Mike Finkel (Jonah Hill), a reporter for the New York Times, conducting interviews with African children for an expose piece of cocoa plantations. Being such an expert journalist, his story naturally makes the front page; he proudly points out to his wife (Felicity Jones) that it’s his tenth cover. But soon his editor discovers that he fudged some of the details to make a better story, and he is consequently fired. Out of work since no newspaper will touch him, Mike latches on to a bizarre story about a man named Christian Longo (James Franco), who is accused of murdering his wife and three children. But while Longo was hiding out in Mexico, he used Finkel’s name. Intrigued, Finkel writes to Longo, and the two begin exchanging letters. Later Finkel visits Longo in jail, and the two quickly develop a relationship as Finkel decides to write a book about Longo; in exchange for teaching him how to be a better writer, Longo will tell Finkel the truth.
The movie begins with Mike Finkel (Jonah Hill), a reporter for the New York Times, conducting interviews with African children for an expose piece of cocoa plantations. Being such an expert journalist, his story naturally makes the front page; he proudly points out to his wife (Felicity Jones) that it’s his tenth cover. But soon his editor discovers that he fudged some of the details to make a better story, and he is consequently fired. Out of work since no newspaper will touch him, Mike latches on to a bizarre story about a man named Christian Longo (James Franco), who is accused of murdering his wife and three children. But while Longo was hiding out in Mexico, he used Finkel’s name. Intrigued, Finkel writes to Longo, and the two begin exchanging letters. Later Finkel visits Longo in jail, and the two quickly develop a relationship as Finkel decides to write a book about Longo; in exchange for teaching him how to be a better writer, Longo will tell Finkel the truth.
What follows is… well it’s not really a traditional mystery, because you are told the details of the crime near the beginning of the movie. Instead, the mystery is whether Longo is telling the truth or whether he’s playing Finkel for a fool. This type of plot relies on the strength of the characters in question to carry it, but honestly they just can’t. See, for a movie about writing the writing is pretty lame. And I should know, I’ve written a whole lot mediocre things; anyone who tries to write creatively writes a lot of second-rate stuff. The dialogue is trite and predictable, and doesn’t give the actors any space to make their characters interesting. The acting itself is okay for what they were given; I never thought I would say this about these two, but Jonah Hill and James Franco are actually being limited by sub-par writing.
The core problem is that I just didn’t find either Hill’s or Franco’s characters very interesting, and that’s a fatal flaw in a movie which relies upon those characters so heavily to carry the plot. Because neither Finkel nor Longo are very interesting, the movie just kind of drags along under its own weight; it’s not particularly bad, but neither is it engaging. I kept waiting for there to be some plot twist or big reveal or even a moment when I would start to become engaged in anything that was happening, but it never came; even at only 95 minutes the movie seems very long. The only moment when I felt a spark of life was when the writing very briefly improved for a single scene in which Felicity Jones’ character confronts Franco’s: this one scene with good writing (and subsequently, good acting) woke me up for a minute with the potential of what this movie could have been–an engaging character piece about deception.
But then the scene ends, the mediocre dialogue resumes, and I realize that Felicity Jones’ character, who gets only one major scene and who is not relevant to the plot at all, is the only person in this movie I care about. At which point I realize that I don’t particularly care whether Christian Longo murdered his family or not, and I let my mind wander for the last few minutes until the movie ends.
Grade: C-
The core problem is that I just didn’t find either Hill’s or Franco’s characters very interesting, and that’s a fatal flaw in a movie which relies upon those characters so heavily to carry the plot. Because neither Finkel nor Longo are very interesting, the movie just kind of drags along under its own weight; it’s not particularly bad, but neither is it engaging. I kept waiting for there to be some plot twist or big reveal or even a moment when I would start to become engaged in anything that was happening, but it never came; even at only 95 minutes the movie seems very long. The only moment when I felt a spark of life was when the writing very briefly improved for a single scene in which Felicity Jones’ character confronts Franco’s: this one scene with good writing (and subsequently, good acting) woke me up for a minute with the potential of what this movie could have been–an engaging character piece about deception.
But then the scene ends, the mediocre dialogue resumes, and I realize that Felicity Jones’ character, who gets only one major scene and who is not relevant to the plot at all, is the only person in this movie I care about. At which point I realize that I don’t particularly care whether Christian Longo murdered his family or not, and I let my mind wander for the last few minutes until the movie ends.
Grade: C-
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