After writing Zodiac and some Sony tentpoles that are best left unnamed, James Vanderbilt embarked on his directorial debut, Truth. The drama follows Robert Redford as CBS anchor Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as producer Mary Mapes in the adaptation of the true 60 Minutes II scandal surrounding the Killian documents. Adapted from Mapes’ 2005 memoir, it tracks their flimsy story that George W. Bush got the upper hand from his father to avoid the draft.
We said in our review, “Unfortunately, just as Vanderbilt seeks to show how politically unbiased Mapes and her crack team were in uncovering what looks to be truth, neither he nor she—whose memoir the film is based upon—are. With a soaring score and lingering shots doing everything but placing an angelic aura around the frame’s subject, Truth is less about finding truth or explaining how fluid the search for it is than to vindicate and bestow sainthood atop these “heroes” who refused to kowtow to interference from CBS’s parent company Viacom as well as the government. Their characters scream about ethics and fairness, yet the filmmakers themselves clearly set-up a very specific good versus evil dynamic to lean their plot upon.”
Ahead of an October release, the first trailer has now arrived and can be seen below for the film also starring Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Stacy Keach, and Bruce Greenwood.
TRUTH is an independent feature film based on the book “Truth and Duty” by Mary Mapes. In the vein of “All The President’s Men” and “The Insider”, it is the incredible true story of Mary Mapes (played by Cate Blanchett), an award-winning CBS News Journalist and Dan Rather’s producer, who broke the Abu-Ghraib prison abuse story, among others.
The film chronicles the story Mapes and Rather (played by Robert Redford) uncovered that a sitting US president may have been AWOL from the United States National Guard for over a year during the Vietnam War. When the story blew up in their face, the ensuing scandal ruined Dan Rather’s career, nearly changed a US Presidential election, and almost took down all of CBS News in the process.
Truth opens on October 16th.