Truth, with Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, is just a whisper campaign

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I have a friend whose father’s daunting intellect is fundamental to the older man’s decidedly ascetic approach to certain of life’s comforts. Take him to dinner somewhere with an even modestly ambitious menu, and he’s likely to remark later, if you ask him how he liked the food, that it was good, sure, “but it was no Whopper.” This he will tell you with neither irony nor ingratitude, which makes it easier to acknowledge a truth that approaches profundity: Appetite and good judgment will always favor extraordinary sashimi over a Burger King Whaler, but the Whopper versus most things simply isn’t a fair fight.

The “it’s no Whopper” benchmark is easily adapted to other vital matters, with the understanding that most such spectrum comparisons won’t be any more fair. For instance, even with Cate Blanchett at full throttle (if not full strength), Truth — writer-director James Vanderbilt’s melodrama recounting Rathergate — is no Whopper. The Whopper in this case being Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), which scolds the profit-minded, scaredy-cat CBS News of a slightly earlier moment and remains a deep, corrosive entertainment. Truth, with its Lifetime-movie beats and its spikes of hysteria and its Dermot Mulroney, is no Whopper. It’s more like the last Arby’s five-for-$5, left in a sack in an old hatchback.

Truth adapts former CBS News producer Mary Mapes’ memoir of the episode that ended Dan Rather’s long tenure as that network’s anchor (and scotched her own TV career), Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power. (It’s hard for me to type that title without mentally hearing Sylvester J. Pussycat pronounce it.) Told mostly in flashback as Mapes prepares to tell a very lopsided panel her side of the story, the movie strolls ankle-deep through a media embarrassment and its aftermath: In the last days of the 2004 presidential campaign, Mapes and her handpicked investigative team get their hands on evidence that President George W. Bush was derelict, maybe even AWOL, while sitting out the Vietnam War as a Texas Air National Guard pilot. Given that the incumbent’s opponent was combat veteran John Kerry, and that Kerry’s service record had been called into question by the smear campaign that came to be known as Swiftboating, such evidence would be explosive. But was it real? After Rather anchored Mapes’ report, which centered on photocopied memos from the early 1970s, the sourcing fell apart, the network apologized and sacrifices were offered up.

It’s gripping raw material, but Vanderbilt — whose screenplay for the 2007 movie Zodiac is absolutely a Whopper — fails to refine it. He’s a first-time director, and it shows. Did he unscrew all the overhead light bulbs himself before the climactic boardroom showdown that he stages, so that the midday encounter looks like a vampire caucus? Instead of a searching cross-examination of America’s newsroom habits, he has essentially made a two-hour movie of the moment in The Insider when Christopher Plummer’s Mike Wallace tells Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman, “I don’t plan to spend the end of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio.” What he has left out is any sense of what was on the line besides a few jobs — Mapes’ and Rather’s chief among them. Yes, the reporters take turns intoning sagacious predictions about how much louder the echo chamber is going to get — about how much of the news is by now about the news itself. But for long stretches, Truth lets you forget what matters more about Mapes and Rather’s story: That our “Mission Accomplished” president, the hawk who sent troops into the Middle East on phony evidence, was almost certainly a draft dodger, and that his two presidential campaigns were among the most ruthless and disciplined of the pre-Citizens United era.

Instead, Truth wastes time on the online invective against Mapes, recalling the American moment when Web trolling began in earnest. Oooh, someone calls Mapes a “witch.” (Mary, stick around a few years past the credits and meet Reddit.) Vanderbilt’s approach allows Blanchett to alternate hardened-career-woman moves with fragile, wine-and-Xanax mommy gestures. It’s a weirdly rigid, facile performance — one with the power to fool you because Blanchett is working opposite B-listers such as Topher Grace (who unfortunately delivers one effectively written diatribe like mid-period Michael J. Fox attempting opera).

She’s best, predictably, in her scenes with Robert Redford, who is fine as Rather — familiarly folksy, though with an unfamiliar interest in minibar whiskey and the occasional third drink at a cocktail party. Contrasting her high-beams dudgeon, his is a quiet nonperformance, closer to a cameo. The actor is here mostly to sub easy cultural equivalence for narrative care: We would all miss Rather a lot more if he’d been Redford the whole time, and we’d certainly have been outraged that it was the Sundance Kid (or, you know, Bob Woodward), not Gunga Dan, who got railroaded.