Toronto Dispatch. 7.

Nothing But the Truth, the latest film by former critic Rod Lurie (The Contender, The Last Castle, Deterrence) gives you the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent and the jailing of Judy Miller of the New York Times in one sucker punch.

The topical melodrama about press constraints and the price journalists and others pay for crossing the line is packed with stars - Kate Beckinsale plays the reporter who exposes Erica van Doren (Vera Farmiga) after an invasion of Venezuela, David Schwimmer is the novelist husband who resents her decision to go to prison rather than reveal her source, Alan Alda is the vain ineffective lawyer who pontificates about the First and Fifth Amendments as his client goes to jail, and Matt Dillon plays a driven by-the-book prosecutor who makes sure that she goes there. Lest I forget, Noah Wyle of ER plays the lawyer for Rachel's newspaper, and Angela Bassett is the editor who stands by her. And... the judge who puts her in jail is none other than Floyd Abrams, the prominent First Amendment lawyer, in what I think is his screen debut. (Perhaps that's why the pro forma cutaways to "real" journalism reporting the story feature Dan Abrams of MSNBC, Floyd's son.) It's a Dream Team, but let's not forget that a Dream Team is also on its way to losing the election for Barack Obama [Ahem... - ed.]. It doesn't make Washington look too good, but no one makes a movie to do that.

As other people have pointed out, this is the kind of moving picture roman a clef that used to be made for television, and should be shown there, if it's shown anywhere. Odd, because Lurie has been directing a lot of television these days. But the corporate-owned TV networks are too smart to get themselves into a debate over media ethics in which they might have to defend a journalist who does something that either annoys the White House or annoys the wrong voters.

But there really isn't much of that debate in Nothing But the Truth. Once the damage is done, and the identity of Erica van Doren is blown, the turgid plot eventually fixates on what happens to the children of accuser and covert agent, in child/parent conversations that could have come out of a cough syrup commercial. It's obvious that the White House is up to something here, but the implied plot from above seems to suggest that it's out to punish a leaker - but can't find the right one. That's what we thought was happening in the Valerie Plame case, until we saw that it was a White House plot from the very beginning to get revenge on the family of Joseph Wilson, whose op ed article in the NYT exposed the Iraq WMD mythology that got us into Iraq in the first place.

In this film, comprised of shots that you have seen before and speeches that you have heard before and prison fights that expose an intrepid journalist to the way that most people solve arguments, Lurie may be right about one thing. Venezuela is the next muscle-flexing conflict.

Things couldn't be more different in Laila's Birthday, in which Rashid Masharawi turns to everyday life to tell his story about a man and his family in a place that's usually associated with violence and the most extreme political invective.

Abu Laila (Mohammed Bakri) is a judge who is now driving a cab in Ramallah on the West Bank - it's not clear why this is, but it's assumed that one fact of life under occupation is that people without the right political connections either leave, or they work in jobs beneath their competence. It's his daughter's birthday, and we follow him through his work day. It's a simple structure; we assume the payoff will be in the details.

The work day is anything but normal, but normal may not be the right expectation for life under the Palestinian Authority under Israeli Occupation. Abu Laila is proud. He won't drive to checkpoints where Israelis detain cars indefinitely and those trying to cross the border are put through humiliating searches. He believes in obeying the law, which puts him at odds with everyone else we see blocking traffic or smoking where it's banned. He's shocked when the officials who tell him to come back tomorrow are expecting a shipment of new drapes for their offices - courtesy of the EU, no doubt - a gesture that seems to be meant to show their corruption. When he finds a mobile phone in the back seat of his cab, he takes it to the police station, where officers are so surprised by such a gesture that they suspect other motives. A bomb goes off when he stops to buy a present for his daughter on the way to returning the phone to his passenger. "Is it us, is it them?" people ask as they hide under tables in a café.

Masharawi mixes the reality of traffic jams and indifferent bureaucrats (they seem to be worse, the smaller the country) with the absurdity of "independence" under occupation. Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami have used the taxi device as a way of putting a microcosm of experience on the screen. Laila's Birthday adds a Palestinian entry to that mini-genre.

- David D'Arcy

More on Nothing But the Truth:

• As a bitchy, comic/melodramatic woman's picture on the order of All About Eve or The Women, Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth is wildly entertaining," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Unfortunatley for Lurie, I think it's probably supposed to be a serious political parable about This Fix We Find Ourselves in Now.... Nothing But the Truth was the most fun I've had at Toronto this year, but I get the feeling that it probably shouldn't have been."

• "Beckinsale is excellent - she's an appealing, empathetic actress who skillfully avoids the melodramatic possibilities of the material," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "Farmiga's also great - sexy, confident, and, finally, in a scene in which she learns that her own colleagues are turning against her, heartbreaking. Ultimately, though, their skillful performances can't save this picture."

• "Where are the juicy details of Rachel's trenchant muckraking finesse, the stuff that got her into the slammer in the first place?" asks Eric Kohn at Jaman Blog. "That's where the real movie hides."

• "Lurie might be too headstrong, with ideas that are loftier and more advanced than his ability to express them," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "It takes great skill to address political and ethical matters without getting preachy, and Lurie has not quite mastered that. But you can overlook an occasional soapbox moment or clunky speech when it's contained in a thoughtful, mature drama like this one."

Update, 9/21: "A former painter and installation artist, the 46-year-old Gaza-born filmmaker Rashid Mashawari (Curfew, Ticket to Jerusalem), a veteran of 20 features and documentaries, has made one of the revelations of this year's Toronto festival, Laila's Birthday, something of a road movie through his adopted city of Ramallah on the West Bank." Howard Feinstein talks with him for Filmmaker.

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2008 9:15 AM