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As a bitchy, comic/melodramatic woman’s picture on the order of All About Eve or The Women, Rod Lurie’s Nothing But The Truth is wildly entertaining. Unfortunatley for Lurie, I think it’s probably supposed to be a serious political parable about This Fix We Find Ourselves in Now…although the inclusion of Alan Alda as a fashion-obsessed high-powered defense attorney does make one wonder. Inspired by the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby CIA leak affair, the film begins with a disclaimer informing us that we’re about to watch a work of total fiction inspired by real events, and this is more than just a token protection against libel. In fact, the way Lurie distorts and embroiders on top of the framework of an actual political scandal is stunning. Drastically rewriting very recent history in order to transform the CIA agent into a dirty-mouthed martyr, the journalist into a 1st Amendment saint who sacrifices her family and freedom in order to protect a source, and the vice president’s chief of staff into a boozy Judas who merely confirms what the reporter already learned from an even more untouchable source, Truth is jaw-droppingly over-the-top in ways that are all good for a laugh, but don’t amount to much in the way of serious critique. Lurie’s shocking liberties might need to be seen to believe, but I’ll spoil them anyway, because they’re just too much fun. If you don’t want to know, don’t click through the link.

In the real world, of course, the journalist was accused of using her platform to prop up the Bush administration’s specious evidence suggesting that war must be waged against Iraq in retaliation for the World Trade Center attack, and the CIA agent was outed in order to discredit the arguments of her husband, a foreign ambassador who wrote an editorial claiming his own fact finding missions had proven the evidence against Iraq to be false. In Lurie’s alternate universe version, President Lyman (Lie Man, get it?) is shot but survives to wage war against Venezuela in retailiation for the assasination attempt. Vera Farmiga’s Plame stand-in Erica goes to Venezuela and comes back to report that she can find no evidence that the country was involved. After war is waged anyway, Erica’s husband writes a couple of editorials restating her case publicly. Kate Beckinsale’s Rachel, a political reporter for a major newspaper, writes a story about Erica’s true identity, and is immediately rounded up by Matt Dillon’s “Pat Dubois, federal prosecutor.” Despite the help of Alda––who takes one look at Schwimmer and says, “I’m putting you in touch with my tailor”––Rachel is thrown in jail for refusing to reveal her source.

A former entertainment reporter and the creator of the lady president TV series Commander in Chief, Lurie seems primarily concerned with the political ideology that could lead to the imprisoning of journalists under the notion that national security should be placed above constitutional protections, and the media climate that could allow a without outrage. He thus does all he can to ensure that our sympathies will lie with the journalist by swapping identifying details. Where real-life imprisoned reporter Miller was a seasoned journalist with a much-older spouse, Lurie brings us a pretty young mother who seems relatively happy dividing her time between the newsroom and suburban complacency with a young son and novelist husband (David Schwimmer in schlubby cad drag). Miller was derided in the press and accused of only withholding her source to protect the Bush administration, Kate Beckinsale’s Rachel gleefully tells her editor early in the film that her story will “bring down the White House.”

Even if she disputed the administration’s evidence, Erica is coded as a loyal cog in the governmental machine which the film seems to be trying to turn the impartial viewer against. “Your paper has been trying to **** my husband ever since he spoke out against this administration!” she screams when Rachel confronts her at her daughter’s soccer game––oh, did I fail to mention that the CIA agent has been turned into a soccer mom? And that her daughter is the same age and goes to the same school as the journalists son? Yeah. Anyway, after she’s outed in the newspaper, Erica goes to Rachel’s house and first acts all chummy in the hopes of getting Rachel to reveal her source. “I know about keeping secrets,” she says, which seems to be her own version of “off the record.” When Rachel refuses, Erica calls her “an unpatriotic little ****.” (This Erica is quite a piece of work. She keeps saying that she doesn’t understand why the journalist would be doing this to her, being that their kids go to the same school. She also says “****” a lot, which I’m sure is not at all a lazily conceived character tic designed to inform us that this broad doesn’t play by the rules.)

There’s something sort of brilliantly underhanded about the way Lurie twists this series of incidents which the average American citizen probably couldn’t even explain in depth (I know I’m a little fuzzy on the finer details), and turns it into a women in prison movie about unsurmountable maternal instinct. The majority of the film is devoted to Rachel sacrificing one aspect of her life after another in order to protect her source, to the point where her steadfast refusal to squawk becomes inexplicable. After several months in the slammer, her allies in the media forget about her. While she is behind bars, her husband takes her lawyer’s advice and gets a better suit –– and then gets a girlfriend. After an unsatisfying conjugal visit reveals the irreperability of her marriage, Rachel gets into a catfight with a fellow inmate and is beaten half to death. Just then, Randy Quaid shows up as the vice president’s chief of staff, and admits that he told Rachel about Erica whilst drunk at a suburban garden party––but only because Rachel asked.

In real life, Miller never revealed her primary source but was set free after several months, while Dick Cheney’s consigliere Scooter Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice for his role in the leak but served no time. In Lurie’s version, Rachel agrees to a plea that will send her to prison for two years without having to reveal her source, and in a final scene flashback, we learn that Rachel got her first inkling of Erica’s true identity from Erica’s own daughter. This explains why Rachel kept asking about the little girl, particularly after Erica was assasinated by a member of a right wing fringe group. She gave up everything in order to protect a child! Who is now an orphan! Maybe because of her! This is probably a methor about how the children, who are our future, will be better served by a free press than by warmongering and paranoia. But by that point, my brain was so scrambled from all the cussing and hair pulling and laugh-out-loud swerves into hysterical historical revisionism that all I could do was giggle. Nothing But the Truth was the most fun I’ve had at Toronto this year, but I get the feeling that it probably shouldn’t have been.