“You’ve been nominated for the Politzer”
With rare exceptions (Brokedown Palace, Snow Angels), Kate Beckinsale has functioned more as eye candy than as an actress. She’s always been good, but she’s been eye candy. My personal favourite eye candy, I must admit, what with that form-fitting leather in the Underworld series and Van Helsing, but few of her roles required real thespian chops. My opinion of her changed, utterly, with Nothing But The Truth, out on DVD now. Kate Beckinsale is an actress. A really good actress, who just happens to be the hottest woman ever to shop up vampires and werewolves.
In Nothing But The Truth, Beckinsale plays a reporter who is clearly based on real-life Washington Post reporter Robert Novak. Now, I have seen photos of Robert Novak. He is a handsome 78-year-old man, but he is certainly nowhere near Kate Beckinsale in the looks department. Perhaps in his youth he was very, very pretty. I wonder how he feels about being played by Beckinsale in this movie. Were I Novak, I would be extremely flattered. And I would have let her shadow me for days, weeks, even months in order to help her get into her role.
Novak, it may be remembered by some, was the reporter who “outed” CIA operative Valerie Plame in his column in 2003. Plame was the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had written a controversial op-ed called What I Didn’t Find In Africa, published in the New York Times in 2003, which criticized the Bush administration heavily. Basically, Wilson suggested that the Bush administration had lied about their reasons for invading Iraq, and had fudged the intelligence that led them to that invasion. When sources in the Bush White House were revealed to have leaked Plame’s identity to Novak, Wilson insisted that it was retribution from the White House for that op-ed piece.
The scandal that ensued claimed several victims, the most notable of which was Scooter Libby, who remains a convicted felon today despite the best efforts of his pal Dick Cheney to plead with Bush at the last moment to grant a pardon…ah hell. If you really want to know all the details of the Valerie Plame affair, click here. You will be redirected to wikipedia. This is a review of the movie, and suffice it to say it is virtually an exact re-enactment of what took place during the Plame investigation. Virtually.
OK, Beckinsale is really playing Judith Miller, the woman to whom the name of Plame was revealed. And Novak. Rolled into one. But every other character in this bizarre morality play is pretty easily identifiable in the film. Vera Farmiga plays Erica Van Doren (Plame), whose husband is an ambassador who wrote some unflattering things about the White House administration…she gets outed by Rachel Armstrong (Beckinsale) in an article in the “Capital Sun-Times”, (a fictional newspaper standing in for the Washington Post).
The nuts and bolts of the Plame story hold true through this first tense half hour of the movie. Then the story takes a striking detour, and I think for the better. Armstrong is called up in front of a special prosecutor named Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon). Dubois is charged with finding, at all costs, the name of the person who leaked the information to Armstrong. In real life, no name was ever revealed, and no source was ever prosecuted. (Libby was charged with obstruction of justice, among other things, but was not the source. Then again, you knew that, because you read the link to wikipedia, right? Isn’t Kate Beckinsale spectacular?)
When Rachel refuses to name her source to the prosecutor, the judge in the case decides she must be thrown into jail until she divulges the name. What ensues is a searing prison drama where she can’t see her kid, her husband (David Schwimmer) initially supports her but soon grows distant and bitter as her incarceration lasts longer and longer. She must deal with her fellow prisoners, some of whom are violent and some of whom are nice. (It’s the nice ones who bring her the cutely mis-spelled message about the Pulitzer Prize.) In the meantime, Farmiga, the outed CIA operative, is having her own troubles with her kid and school and the media attention, and she questions the loyalty of her bosses even as they question hers.
All of this is dramatic, but for me the most fascinating part of the movie was the legal drama itself. The idea that the special prosecutor can compel a reporter to divulge her source or jail her indefinitely. The idea that the reporter can take a principled stand for justice and choose to remain incarcerated rather than betray her journalistic integrity. I think there is a chance that Nothing But The Truth could have been more powerful had the reporter been played by an ugly old man, and the fact that they chose Beckinsale clearly indicates to me that there was some kind of “hot woman” requirement for the role as requested by some annoying focus group.
But she not only surprised me, she absolutely stunned me in this role. Kate Beckinsale has given the best performance of her life, and has served notice that not only is she a real, serious actress but she is also capable of something even better than this. I think I’ll be paying a lot more attention to her in the future, because I think she has an Oscar nomination or two in her over the next few years. She perfectly captures Rachel’s desperation, exhaustion, depression, and conviction in every scene, and she is absolutely riveting. And this time it isn’t just for her looks! Although of course they help. She is absolutely wonderful.
Nothing But The Truth is by no means a perfect movie. It has moments of power, moments of brilliance, and gets that magnificent performance by Beckinsale to drive the whole thing. But it has a pretty silly, cutesy, easy and obvious ending, and it lags at times. But it does a good job of dramatizing one of the most sensational political events of the Bush administration, and it serves notice to the world - or at least to me - Kate Beckinsale, the actress, has arrived.
