 Rod Lurie’s upcoming film, Nothing But the Truth, is, as they say, a thinly veiled version of the now-infamous Valerie Plame leak. Hollywood, as Hollywood does, has taken a number of liberties with l’affaire d’Libby: the fifty-something Judith Miller character is played by a young and sexy Kate Beckinsale; the newspaper of record is no longer the New York Times, but a fictional Washington outfit; and the scandal itself springs not from a CIA agent’s leak of bogus information that helped increase the tempo of drumbeats for war, but from an attempted assassination of the President by, of all people, the Venezuelans. (Oh, and the Miller character is portrayed as a scrappy, principled working mom instead of a hypocritical, self-serving careerist scumbag who mistook the role of a journalist for that of a publicity hack for the Bush administration. But that’s a different story.) A Washington Post piece on how the movie’s story evolved is fascinating enough for its lesson in the best intentions run up against the impenetrable wall of Hollywood-style storytelling, but even more so for the delightful moment when Beckinsale refers to film critics as "you people." — Leonard Pierce
|
