Review: Truth Is Elusive, Slippery In Entertaining 'truth'

There's a scene in "Truth," James Vanderbilt's crisp, absorbing new film about the doomed 2004 CBS story on then-president George W. Bush and his National Guard service, where execs are doing something utterly mundane. Between sports and fluffy specials, there aren't many dates available for the potentially explosive "60 Minutes II" story. Credit goes to Vanderbilt (who also penned the script) and his cast —Blanchett, Robert Redford, and Stacy Keach especially — for making a cracklingly entertaining newsroom film about an endlessly thorny story, to say the least. The film is based on one point of view: that of Mapes, who lost her job in the fallout and on whose own book the script is based. [...] with the exception of one eleventh-hour speech highly critical of Viacom, CBS's parent company, the film largely avoids temptation to be too preachy. [...] the film is a fascinating look at investigative broadcast journalism and how it intersected with election-year politics in one relentlessly slippery case. "Questions help reporters get to the truth," Mapes tells her young son. Truth," a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America "for language and a brief nude photo.