True crime stories have always been popular, but in recent months the high profile successes of the Serial podcast and The Jinx on HBO have given the genre a more elevated cultural legitimacy. Part of the allure for both of those examples is the unsettling intimacy developed between the journalists and their subjects - men who are, very probably, murderers. This intimacy is in many ways the subject of the new film True Story, which both indulges in and critiques the queasy thrill of getting inside the mind of a killer.
When director Rupert Goold first shows Mike Finkel (Jonah Hill), he’s in a small hut, interviewing African victims of plantation violence for a story in The New York Times. He’s soon back in the Manhattan newsroom, where he’s clearly in his element, winning at poker while editing his piece, basking in the admiration and envy of his colleagues as he earns another cover story for the weekend magazine. Yet something curious has happened in between these scenes – the film shows another man, whom we later learn is Christian Longo (James Franco), also introducing himself as “Mike Finkel, New York Times,” as he seduces a German tourist in Mexico. For both Finkels, the good times soon come to a screeching halt, as the real Mike Finkel is fired and disgraced for misrepresentations in his story, while the fake Mike Finkel is extradited back to Oregon where he awaits trial for the murder of his wife and two young children.
The real Finkel reunites with his wife (Felicity Jones) in snowbound Montana to lick his wounds, where he soon learns about the accused murderer impersonating him. Intrigued, he meets with Longo and learns that not only is Longo a longtime fan of Finkel’s work who offers to tell his story exclusively to Finkel, there are also a set of strange similarities between the two men. Finkel sees this huge scoop as a chance for his comeback and begins to adapt Longo’s story into a book, but as they talk around the subject of the killings, he begins to suspect that Longo’s sense of the truth might be as malleable as his own.
It’s a bit unusual at first to see these two actors together in such a serious story, but they play their parts well – Franco gives Longo a vulnerable charm while remaining darkly unknowable and Hill plays Finkel as both intelligent and sometimes blindly driven. Felicity Jones seems at first to be caught in a thankless “concerned, but passive wife” role, but she ends up getting the best scene of the film, when Jill confronts Longo with the truths that her journalist husband has skirted. The director Rupert Goold, making his film debut after working in British theatre, portrays Montana and Oregon as trapped in a suffocating, midwinter gray even bleaker than the prison interior and shows the mysterious allure that Finkel sees in Longo.
True Story asks the question, when we give murderers a mouthpiece, just who gains what? And who pays the price? Both Finkel and Longo need a confessor on a personal level, but in publishing Longo’s story is Finkel serving the public good as a journalist or simply trying to redeem his career? True Story doesn’t offer any moral dictums, but thoughtfully shows the murky gray areas in this examination of the power and pitfalls of storytelling.
