True Story

Jonah Hill and James Franco were some of the biggest Hollywood celebrities to attend the Sundance Film Festival this year (aside from Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain promoting Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck).  While I'm not a fan of James Franco, the premise of their movie, True Story, intrigued me and I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a ticket to a screening.  The movie is now out in limited release so I went to see it last night.  Michael Finkel (Hill) is a reporter who has been fired from the New York Times for creating a composite character in a story about the child slave trade in West Africa.  Christian Longo (Franco) is a manipulative sociopath awaiting trial for killing his entire family.  Finkel, now in disgrace, learns that Longo impersonated him while on the run and arranges to meet him for a series of interviews in jail.  Finkel desperately needs a big story to revive his career and gets completely drawn in by the charm and charisma of the accused murderer despite the overwhelming evidence which points to his guilt.  It is an intense psychological analysis of two proven liars discussing their perceptions of the "truth" and I found it fascinating, albeit unsettling.  The film is at its best in the scenes depicting the intimate conversations between the two main characters.  It was strange to see Hill in such a serious role but he does a good job with the material and Franco made my skin crawl, especially during an upsetting courtroom exchange between Finkel and Longo.  The parts of the film that didn't work for me were the artistic flashbacks of Longo's wife and children playing and the completely superfluous character of Finkel's wife Jill, played by Felicity Jones.  Furthermore, the film concludes with a highly charged scene where Finkel confronts Longo about his lies to which Longo counters that Finkel got a lucrative book deal out of it so he shouldn't complain.  This scene had such a note of finality about it so it was disconcerting to see a slide in the end credits which said that Finkel and Longo still regularly correspond. In my opinion, the film, which already took artistic license with the "truth," would have been more powerful without that information.  Despite these flaws, it is a compelling story with great performances and I would recommend it to fans of psychological thrillers.