Nothing but the Truth (2008)

Rod Lurie's Nothing but the Truth arrived in 2008 with a strong cast, a Toronto premiere, and a distributor that filed for Chapter 11 before anyone could buy a ticket. Kate Beckinsale plays Rachel Armstrong, a Washington reporter who publishes the name of a covert CIA operative and then goes to jail rather than name the leaker. The scaffolding comes from the Valerie Plame affair, though Lurie has insisted the film is fiction. The result is a sturdy, well-acted procedural about a woman in a cell and a lawyer in a robe.

The film's politics belong to an earlier era. Beckinsale carries the picture, Angela Bassett runs the newsroom, Vera Farmiga plays the operative with a hard edge, and none of this is staged as a diversity announcement. The women are simply competent, which was once enough. There is no engagement with race as a subject, no queer presence, no environmental thread, no critique of capital. The villain here is the national security state, which is a different target from the one today's audiences are trained to expect. Nobody worries about their body, their neurology, or their carbon footprint. They worry about subpoenas.

Where the film does lean forward is in its speeches. Alan Alda, as the defending attorney, argues before the Supreme Court that without source protection there is no free press, and perhaps no democracy. The prosecutor lectures. The judge lectures. Everyone gets a turn at the podium. But the vocabulary is civil-libertarian and mid-century, not the language of contemporary social justice, so the sermonizing lands as earnest instead of fashionable. The film respects its audience, as Roger Ebert noted, and that respect now reads as a period detail. It is a well-made artifact from a time when a movie could be politically serious without being sorted into a camp. Worth a look, if only to remember the texture of that vanished consensus.