London Film Festival 2015: Truth, review – Cate Blanchett may win Oscar nomination for portrayal of proud, boozy news producer

In America, they’ve loved it, this heroic, not to say bombastic, account of how, in 2004, CBS News questioned President George W Bush’s dubious career in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War era but didn’t succeed in making its allegations stick.

Even though it is based on the self-justifying book by the news producer Mary Mapes (played with flaring intensity by Cate Blanchett) sacked for her part in the cock-up, you finish the film unclear about where exactly the truth lies. So no real outrage about the suppression of free reporting is generated and, instead, to care, you need to be hugely invested in the fact that this botched 60 Minutes show contributed to the post-election retirement of the much loved veteran news anchor Dan Rather (authoritatively played by super-wrinkly Robert Redford), not easy for British audiences, who may have little identification with him nor the general reverence for that role that Americans seem to nurture.

Truth makes heroes of old-style news reporters, hitting the phones, pulling all-nighters, scribbling notes and tracking down the story the authorities didn’t want you to know. All nostalgia, now.

There’s a strong cast (Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss and Topher Grace on the news team) but the writing and direction by James Vanderbilt is surprisingly crass, manipulative and ultimately sanctimonious. “You stop asking questions, that’s when the American people lose — so keep it up”, Rather tells an awed young researcher, passing on the torch.

That leaves Blanchett’s full-on performance as the proud, tenacious but also vulnerable and boozy Mapes as the centre of attraction. In this moderate year, an Oscar nomination for her seems perfectly possible, despite the movie’s pieties.

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