'True Story' (2015) Movie Critics Reviews

Drama, Hollywood, Movie Review, Mystery, Thriller,

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True Story (2015) Movie Critic Reviews
Runtime:     100 min
Rating:     Rated R for language and some disturbing material
Production:     Regency Enterprises
Genres:     Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Country:     USA
Language:     English     
Director:       Rupert Goold
Stars:      James Franco, Jonah Hill, Felicity Jones

True Story (2015) Movie Review: When disgraced New York Times reporter Michael Finkel meets accused killer Christian Longo - who has taken on Finkel's identity - his investigation morphs into a game of cat-and-mouse.

IMDB : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2273657

True Story Movie Review By MDBReviews

How Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill) came to meet Chris Longo (James Franco) is an entrancing story of chance and merciless wrongdoing. The way its portrayed in True Story, however, uncovers less about the realities of Finkel and Longo's peculiar, genuine cooperation than it does the way of truth, and the relationship in the middle of correspondent and subject.As we're introduced to Finkel, he's in the middle of getting the boot from his job with The New York Times, for conflating the experiences of a number of young African boys who were used for slave labor in cocoa plantations along the Ivory Coast into a single figure in his 2001 New York Times Magazine story "Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?" The path that leads him from this disgrace to sitting beside Longo might have been treated as a tale of redemption, a talented writer finding his journalistic conviction in the wake of a huge professional betrayal, but the filmmakers see this more as the story of Finkel coming to terms with the hard, often conflicting truths at the center of his profession.

First experience with Longo is a blaze of wild incident, as Hill's moderately aged correspondent is telephoned for a quote concerning Longo professing to be Finkel when he was captured in Cancun for the homicide of his family in Oregon. Whatever remains of the film bases on Longo's homicide trial and the composition of Longo's diary, which serves as the source material for and shares its name with Rupert Goold's film, yet the particulars of the dramatization and dialog depend on the subjectivity of verifiable and fiction narrating alike. In Goold and David Kajganich's script, Franco's cranky, pacified executioner jumbles the premise of his blame every step of the way, admitting to the homicide of two of his kids, yet not his wife, Mary Jane , or their third kid, guaranteeing a spotty memory of the occasions. The script sees Finkel as experiencing a kind of scraped area toward oneself, attempting to discover, and much in the same route as his editors at the Times, the escape clauses and breaks in the story that Longo apparently turns for him.

Finkel and Longo's relationship is reminiscent of the one that developed between Truman Capote and Perry Smith during the writing of In Cold Blood, a process that served as the basis of Bennett Miller's Capote. The similarities, however, don't end there, as Goold's aesthetic comes off as a barely thought-out variation of Miller's signature style, particularly in its cold, lugubrious vision of American landscapes. But whereas Miller's compositions and use of long takes in Capote invoke a haunting sense of how the past is at once philosophically weighty and essentially unknowable, Goold's images only go toward building a mildly glum atmosphere of impending dread. If True Story's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.

Longo is composed as a genial, if not precisely enchanting, man, and Franco's unpretentious conveyance brings out the phantom of a chilly, vital controller stowing away underneath the agreeability.Similarly, Hill plays Finkel as welcoming, but also slyly stirs up a sense of greed and desperation in his character when money and reputation are at stake. Their exchanges give the film an involving dramatic backbone, whereas Goold's visuals keep things vaguely moody without ever truly reflecting the violent emotions at the core of the story. At one point, the director casts Franco's criminal in shadow-drenched silhouette, an image that transparently suggests both the character's emptiness and Finkel's—and in turn, our—inability to truly know him. The script tangles outstandingly with the thought that any "genuine story" is to a great extent subject to the point of view of the storyteller, however the treat cutter inauspiciousness of Goold's visual strategies just offers the film up 'til now another acceptable cut of American genuine wrongdoing.

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Matt Brunson | Creative Loafing

Franco often comes across more as a guy peeved that someone tapped out the frat-house keg than a tortured individual potentially engaged in Machiavellian maneuverings.

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Jeanne Kaplan | Kaplan vs. Kaplan

Goold never allows the script or actors to make light of the relationship --- or its importance.

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David Kaplan | Kaplan vs. Kaplan

Hill and Franco did not rehearse their scenes together beyond the first table read, all the better to make their interaction more natural and plausible. It worked.

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Tony Medley | Tolucan Times

A story with potential that's done in by Hill, who is not up to the task of portraying such a complex character.

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John Wirt | Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA)

Jonah Hill stars in a drama that's no laughing matter. Even though the film grows muddled in trails of misdirected ambition and deceit, Hill excels.

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