Truth Is Beauty at Tiff As Films Take Investigative Role

By Peter Howell Movie Critic
Toronto Star
September 10, 2015

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2015/09/10/truth-is-beauty-at-tiff-as-films-take-investigative-role.html

My ink-stained heart is gladdened that one of the early talking points at TIFF 2015 is Spotlight, a film about journalists unmasking Roman Catholic Church corruption.

Tom McCarthy’s engrossing procedural on the Boston Globe’s 2002 pedophile priest expose was the film I heard mentioned most often at a pre-TIFF party Wednesday night, the “Critical Drinking” bash hosted by the Toronto Film Critics Association and sponsored by the Star.

You’d expect journalists to be captivated by a film like Spotlight, but there were also many non-journos at the event who expressed great interest in seeing it. The cast includes Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and John Slattery, all in top form as they depict the real reporters and editors who doggedly unearthed a Boston Archdiocese coverup, one with global implications, of the widespread sexual abuse of minors by supposedly holy men.

Expectations of good box office and Oscar nominations are justifiably high for Spotlight, which is scheduled to open Nov. 6 following its TIFF premiere.

I note with satisfaction how many of the high-profile movies at TIFF this year involve seekers of the truth — not just journalists but also other high-minded individuals, who want to get to the bottom of a story that can’t be told via a Facebook post or 140-character tweet.

It feels like the 1970s all over again, a great time in cinema when so many films took the stance of finding the real story behind the official one. It’s no accident that Spotlight is already being compared to All the President’s Men, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 classic about the newspaper scribes who uncovered the Watergate scandal.

Helen Mirren and Bryan Cranston in Trumbo.

TIFF 2015 is giving us movies like Jay Roach’s Trumbo, in which Bryan Cranston delivers a buoyant rendering of embattled screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who valiantly fought the “red menace” lies and vendettas of the House Un-American Activities Committee during Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age.

Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war thriller Sicario stars Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin in the proverbial tangled web of “good guys” doing bad things in the name of expediency and ultimate ideals. Blunt’s FBI agent Kate Macer finds herself drawn into a covert operation that may save lives, but which violates many laws and her own conscience.

David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis also gets into the murky waters of situational ethics. It stars Sandra Bullock and Billy Bob Thornton as rival spin doctors in a Bolivian presidential campaign where the cynical goal is to get a candidate elected, not to demonstrate how honest he is.

Michael Moore’s documentary Where to Invade Next was being kept under tight wraps, prior to Thursday’s night world premiere (and my column deadline), but it promises to ask probing, pertinent and very funny questions about what the U.S. military-industrial complex is really planning for its next global caper.

In the promising new Platform program, a juried selection of international excellence, Joachim Lafosse’s The White Knights tells the fact-based story of a child-relief organization in Chad, led by Vincent Lindon’s rough-hewn Jacques, who arrive from afar promising to “rescue” 300 children and to provide them sanctuary within their war-torn African country.

Jacques’ motives seem benign, as do those of fellow workers in Move for Kids, a French-based NGO. But a TV journalist embedded with the group, making what she thought would be a good-news documentary, must wrestle with her conscience when she realizes that there’s a mass abduction being planned behind the feel-good facade.

“You can’t just let it happen without reacting!” someone challenges her, which could be the motto for all the truth seekers in these films.

James Anderbilt’s Truth has its intentions right in the title, starring Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett and Elisabeth Moss in the fact-based story of a 60 Minutes scoop that wasn’t, or at least wasn’t what it was supposed to be. Blanchett plays the reporter who follows the tantalizing tip that George W. Bush used family connections to evade Vietnam War service, an embarrassing revelation that, if true, could have potentially hurt Bush’s 2004 presidential re-election bid.

The tip ultimately didn’t pan out, but that didn’t stop 60 Minutes from going big with it, before ultimately recanting it. The end result didn’t hurt Bush but it ended the career of journalism legend Dan Rather and severely tarnished the previously sterling reputation of 60 Minutes.

It’s a sobering reminder that the quest for truth also involves staring into a mirror, to question the motives of the supposed teller of the real story.

Contact: phowell@thestar.ca