True defective

The lines that used to separate comedic and dramatic actors have become less and less substantial in recent years. Whereas noncomedic turns from superstars like Bill Murray or Robin Williams were considered bold departures in decades past, actors like James Franco and Jonah Hill can slip between genres pretty easily these days. Franco and Hill starred together in This is the End, but in director and co-writer Rupert Goold’s True Story, they’re trading concepts of moral culpability instead of bong rips and masturbation jokes. Their credibility as dramatic actors is never a question; the credibility of the bland true-life drama they inhabit is entirely another matter.

Hill plays New York Times journalist Mike Finkel (the film is based on Finkel’s memoir), an accomplished but utterly arrogant writer unafraid to bribe sources and massage the truth in order to form a better story. Franco is Christian Longo, an accused murderer hiding out abroad under the identity of New York Times journalist Mike Finkel. At the same time that the fake Finkel gets captured and returned to the United States for trial, the real Finkel gets publicly disgraced for factual indiscretions in his latest article, becomes a pariah in his own industry and retreats to Montana. When Mike learns of his “doppelganger,” he pays him a visit in his Washington prison. The two seasoned liars hit it off, and Mike comes to see Christian as his ticket back into the game, even if it means protecting a potential murderer.

Franco possesses a strange sort of versatility—he’s a mainstream star, an indie star, an outsider artist and an academic all at the same time. But he’s not a chameleon—give him that one note to play, and he can play it beautifully, but he’s not right for this sort of slippery, Primal Fear-style master manipulator. We’re supposed to believe that Christian subtly hoodwinks Mike into forming his legal defense, and while Christian describes himself as “decent and regular 92.88 percent of the time,” there’s just no connection between the performance that Franco gives and the guy described as murdering his wife and children in a fit of economic panic, or the guy who sends Mike a legal pad filled with creepy, Babadook-style pencil drawings.

It doesn’t help that the stakes are all screwy, and as was the case with Philomena, it’s never clear why the story of the disgraced writer reclaiming his reputation is placed front and center, while life and death matters get pushed to the sidelines. Even Truman Capote wasn’t that egotistical. The filmmaking is drab and predictable—Goold holds the film at a resting pulse throughout, seemingly encouraging his often outsized lead actors to underplay their parts, and racking up easy points while neglecting to ask some of the more troubling questions at hand. True Story is a pedestrian effort on many fronts, with very little dramatic urgency—it’s not so much a game of cat-and-mouse as it is as game of mouse-and-mouse, minus the game.

Academy Award nominee Felicity Jones plays Mike’s pianist wife, Jill, and sad to say she’s completely wasted. I fear that wasting Jones will become a habit with Hollywood; as Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything, she became a supporting player in her own life story, and here she is given one of the most superfluous “concerned wife” parts imaginable. Jones is far too interesting and intelligent for this drippy token role, and yet she delivers the film’s strongest performance.

Even at a relatively lean 100 minutes, True Story drags—Mike pitches Christian’s story to HarperCollins for a huge advance (predictably, the writing process is portrayed as a long, painstaking process of pinning research to the wall, followed by a few seconds of furious writing, and voila—book done!), then goes into crisis mode when Christian enters a “confusing” plea in court, while Jill grows increasingly unsettled by both men.

The ending is haunted and uncertain, but we have little stake in it, because we never feel that merge of identities; for all of its dreary, off-white contemplation, True Story never gets out of its own head.