Rupert Goold (2015)
As might be expected from the title, it’s based on real-life events and deceptions are a major theme. In November 2001, the New York Times published an article on the African slave trade by Michael (Mike) Finkel, a rising, highly ambitious young journalist on the paper’s staff. The article (‘Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?’) received plenty of attention, including from aid charities, which questioned its veracity. Mike Finkel was forced to admit that Youssouf Malé was a composite character, based on the identity of several young men whom he’d interviewed in southern Mali. The New York Times fired Finkel. In January 2002, an Oregon man called Christian Longo was arrested in Mexico and taken into US custody in Texas, where he was charged with the murder of his wife and three children the previous month. Soon afterwards, Mike Finkel learned that Longo, during his weeks as a fugitive, had claimed to be a reporter for the New York Times – by the name of Mike Finkel.
According to True Story, which Rupert Goold and David Kajganich adapted from Finkel’s memoir of the same name, the real Mike (Jonah Hill), desperate to get his journalistic career back on track and sensing an opportunity to do so, visits Longo (James Franco) in prison. They meet there on a number of further occasions while the latter is awaiting trial; Longo agrees to the interviews on the understanding that Finkel will not disclose what gets said until the trial is over. There’s one further condition: Longo has sent to Finkel eighty pages of autobiographical material, listing all the mistakes he’s made in his life and entitled ‘Wrong Turns’. He tells the journalist that he greatly respects his writing and would like to be a writer himself. Finkel agrees that, for each question that’s answered in the course of their conversations, he will give Longo a note on how to improve his prose. Finkel is increasingly intrigued by Longo and increasingly doubtful that he is guilty as charged. Longo indicates that he will plead not guilty. By the time the trial begins, Finkel has sold his idea for a book about Longo to Harper Collins, for a $250,000 advance.
Finkel is shocked – so too the prospective publishers – when Longo pleads not guilty to the murder of his elder daughter and his son but guilty to the killing of his younger daughter and his wife. (The pairs of corpses were found in different locations.) In the witness box, Longo explains that his wife, Mary Jane, had slain the two elder children and, he thought, the youngest, Madison, too; that he strangled Mary Jane to death in uncomprehending rage at what she’d done; that he was then shocked to see Madison showing slight signs of life and killed her too, as an act of mercy. The jury doesn’t believe Longo’s story. He is found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death. Finkel goes back to visit him, on Death Row, and Longo eventually admits to Finkel that he committed all four murders. Finkel’s True Story has now been published and is a success. The book’s author is unnerved to be told by its subject, however, that his name as a writer will forever be linked with Longo’s – and that, if Longo ever suggests that they meet again, Finkel will always come back for more. The legends at the end of the film, summarising the subsequent real lives of the protagonists, appear to vindicate Longo’s prophecy. We’re told that Finkel has never since written for the New York Times; that Longo, who is still on Death Row, has had several pieces, written from the condemned cell, published by the paper; and that the two men still speak on the phone regularly.
The film needs a script much better than the one it’s got in order to be effective – and distinctive. Although this may be a true story, it’s also well-trodden faction and non-fiction territory: the set-up and the journalistic ethical issues involved evoke, in particular, In Cold Blood and The Journalist and the Murderer. (The fictional news story element also recalls Shattered Glass.) The Truman Capote-Perry Smith dynamic is recalled both in the writer’s growing obsession with the killer whose life and crimes he sets out to exploit for his own literary ends and in the final outcome – or, at least, the epilogue on screen. (At the end of Capote (2005), Bennett Miller and Dan Futterman note that In Cold Blood made Truman Capote the most famous writer in America but that he never finished another book.) The opportunistic starting point of Mike Finkel’s relationship with Christian Longo calls to mind Janet Malcolm’s study and the exploitation of the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald by the journalist Joe McGinniss; what then happens in True Story, with Finkel manipulated by Longo, is virtually a reversal of The Journalist and the Murderer scenario. Another challenge in bringing the material to the screen is that True Story is essentially about different verbal means of spinning a line, oral and written, and it’s difficult (as usual in films) to give the written element dramatic life. For example, when Longo’s voice reads extracts from ‘Wrong Turns’, the screen shows his unsophisticated handwriting but his prose doesn’t sound in dire need of Finkel’s expert advice. It’s not surprising that Longo’s pictorial marginalia, including images representing his dead wife and children, overpower his words on the page and on the soundtrack.
In view of the importance of the written word in True Story, it’s unfortunate that the screenplay is so full of holes. The nearly exclusive focus on Finkel and Longo is a reasonable pretext for omitting any of Longo’s interactions outside the courtroom with his defence attorney; the sketchiness of the relationship between Finkel and his wife Jill (Felicity Jones) is much more of a problem. It’s confusing too that Finkel’s planned book appears to be complete before Longo’s trial begins. (When Jill picks up a thick stack of papers, with ‘True Story’ typed on the top page, her husband tetchily warns her to be careful with the manuscript, as if he’d written the whole thing in longhand and hadn’t another copy.) It’s impossible to understand how Finkel has produced so much material on the basis of the prison interviews with Longo that the film has shown (and the Wikipedia article on Mike Finkel implies that he wrote True Story at a later stage of his relationship with Longo). Rupert Goold, currently the artistic director of the Almeida Theatre, hasn’t directed a cinematic feature before and you doubt his attentiveness from an early stage. Most of the first part concentrates on Finkel but does include an introduction to the as yet unnamed Longo, while he’s on the run in Mexico and visiting a church there. It’s a bit lame that, when a young German woman asks his name, he gives Finkel’s. (We could easily pick up there was something suspicious about Longo from the second Mexican sequence, after he’s been to bed with the German tourist and watches from a hotel room window as police arrive, no doubt to apprehend him. We could then make the connection with this mystery man at the point at which Mike Finkel finds out about being impersonated by a murder suspect.) Once he’s told about Longo, Finkel does a Google search. We can see from one of the links that appears on his laptop screen that Longo has said that he pretended to be Finkel because he admired the latter’s journalism – yet Finkel is then shown as baffled as to Longo’s motives for taking his name until they meet.
Longo tells Finkel that he was never happier than when he’d assumed the latter’s identity: we’ve no idea what Longo means by this and we want to know what he means (even if it was a flat lie). It’s surprising that the investigative journalist Finkel doesn’t ask Longo what he means. At one point, Finkel develops an idea that there’s a spooky kinship between him and Longo, pointing out to his wife the similarities between the doodles in Finkel’s notebooks and the drawings in Longo’s ‘Wrong Turns’ manuscript. Here too, a bizarre statement isn’t probed by the person on the receiving end of it; the kinship thing is then dropped. Repeated lost-Eden flashbacks, featuring Longo’s wife (Maria Dizzia) and their three children (Charlotte Driscoll, Connor Kikot and Stella Rae Payne), are such a cliché that you think there must be more to them than meets the eye – and wonder if Longo’s claim that Mary Jane killed the kids might be true. Perhaps Rupert Goold did intend these inserts as a red herring. By the end of the film, though, I suspected they were merely padding.
I was attracted to True Story purely by the trailer and the cast. I knew nothing of the source material and I’m glad I was so uninformed: ignorance gave the film a measure of suspense and, even though its major weaknesses were increasingly obvious, the story and the valiant main actors just about held my interest throughout. As Longo, James Franco keeps you guessing, with clever use of his eyes and smile. (It’s hard to tell if the light in the eyes goes out when the smile disappears or if they’re always dead but the deadness is concealed by the smile.) Franco is fascinating to watch yet it remains unclear as to why Mike Finkel was fascinated by Christian Longo. Jonah Hill is good as Finkel only within the severe limits of the role as written: since Finkel is presented almost entirely as a patsy, there’s not a lot more that the actor playing him can do. The part of Finkel’s wife is even worse, although Felicity Jones manages to give it a bit of substance. One of the stronger scenes in True Story comes when Jill Finkel takes a call, while Mike is away at the trial, from Longo on a prison pay phone: you do get a sense here of how Longo is getting to the Finkels (and enjoying it). Unfortunately, the positive impression is more than cancelled out by a later, stupidly lurid sequence. Jill visits Longo in prison, plays him music by the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), and tells how Gesualdo murdered his wife, her lover and, subsequently, her and Gesualdo’s young son. If this prison visit did happen in real life, Rupert Goold manages to convince you that it couldn’t have.
The what-happened-next summaries at the end of the film explain that Mike Finkel still lives in Montana with Jill and their three children: it’s not clear when these children were born – there’s no sign or mention of them in the film. The neat irony that Finkel has never again written for the New York Times but Christian Longo has, would be weakened if the closing legends also mentioned that Finkel went on to win a National Magazine Award for photojournalism for a National Geographic piece in 2007. The film-makers’ omission here serves rather as confirmation of Mike Finkel’s instinct, when he wrote the African slave trade article in 2001, that you can up the impact of what you tell people by not telling them the whole truth.
22 July 2015
