When former New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days in the summer of 2005, the legal and ethical issues that put her there posed a moral quandary for liberals. On the one hand, Miller was standing up for her First Amendment right to protect a confidential source. On the other, her source had recklessly and intentionally put a covert CIA operative in danger by exposing that operative's real name in a petty act of retribution. Moreover, Miller's inaccurate reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction made her motives for not revealing the source all the more suspect -- was she standing up for principle or merely protecting a fellow member of the conservative Beltway establishment?
Nuance, however, is not Hollywood's specialty, so it's no wonder that the film adaptation of the story traded in some of the thornier issues at the heart of the case for cleaner, easier to dramatize ones. Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), the heroine at the center of the new film Nothing But the Truth, is not Judith Miller. Yes, she goes to jail for refusing to name a source who revealed the identity of a covert CIA operative (Vera Farmiga). Yes, that CIA operative is married to a former ambassador who writes op-eds arguing against the current government's foreign policy. Yes, she is hounded by a particularly aggressive and determined special prosecutor (Matt Dillon). But Armstrong doesn't have any of the political baggage that made Miller's case so interesting, and, as a consequence, her story is far less challenging and compelling than the real one that inspired it.
In Nothing But the Truth, Iraq has become Venezuela, which the U.S. has invaded in retaliation for an attempted assassination of the president of the United States. Valerie Plame has become Erica Van Doren, a CIA agent whose report demonstrating that Venezuela had nothing to do with the assassination attempt was swept under the rug by her superiors. And Rachel Armstrong is the Miller-type figure who writes the story uncovering the existence of Van Doren's report. Van Doren and Armstrong are also mothers of children who attend school together, which adds a side of domestic drama since both characters must demonstrate that they can be strong, principled women and good mothers at the same time.
Rod Lurie, the writer and director of Nothing But the Truth, appears to have a keen interest in watching women navigate the world of politics. His first film, The Contender, is a contrived and overwritten morality play about a female vice-presidential candidate caught up in an alleged sex scandal. He also created the short-lived television series Commander-in-Chief, in which Geena Davis plays an inexperienced vice president suddenly elevated to the top post in the country, following the death of her running mate. Both The Contender and Commander-in-Chief suffered from Lurie's inability to separate his middlebrow dramatic impulses from his eagerness to wear his civic-mindedness on his sleeve -- more often than not, he aims to produce thought-provoking political thrillers in the vein of Pollack or Lumet and ends up closer to a stale episode of Law & Order.
Nothing But the Truth suggests that the large gap between Lurie's high-minded aspirations and his limited cinematic abilities is closing, albeit slowly. His writing and directing are still frustratingly unsubtle -- he pushes the story into directions that don't always feel earned, and for each well-rounded central character there is a caricatured one on the edges -- but he coaxes strong performances from his cast and keeps the verbal moralizing to a minimum. Beckinsale successfully captures the principled yet delicate nature of Armstrong's character -- she plays the reporter as clever and ambitious but distraught over the damage her story has done to her family and other innocent parties. As her fashion-conscious, high-profile attorney, Alan Alda is given the most speechifying and manages to prevent some of Lurie's clunkier lines from landing too hard. And as the outed CIA agent, Farmiga creates enough sympathy for her character to sustain the film's central dilemma between First Amendment absolutism and national-security priorities.
The battle between the press and the government is ripe for drama about negotiation, duty, and public awareness, so it's disappointing that Lurie chooses to turn the last half of Nothing But the Truth into a character study of Armstrong and her personal sacrifices rather than a broader look at the implications of her case. The melodrama of her prison stay and her worsening relationship with her family is tedious and produces an ending for Armstrong that feels forced and not quite believable. As for the ending of the film itself, let's just say that we finally learn who that secret source was, and, as he did in The Contender, Lurie offers a reveal that's a little too cute by half and that essentially undermines some of the more principled arguments made in Armstrong's defense. Scooter Libby may not have been the most surprising or interesting player in the Miller-Plame saga, but at least his motivations for leaking Valerie Plame's name were both believable and fascinating. Frankly, Nothing But the Truth could have used more characters like that.
