Aubrey Malone
U.S. President George W. Bush listens as Pope John Paul II makes a point at the end of their meeting at the Vatican June 4, 2004. It was their first meeting since the Iraq war. The pope told Bush he was deeply concerned about the "grave unrest" in Iraq. (CNS photo/Reuters) (March 21, 2014) See stories SAINTS- March 19, 2014, March 21, 2014 and to come. photo: CNS Truth (15A)
Placed beside Oliver Stone’s coruscating indictment of the Bush regime in W. (Dubya) and Michael Moore’s in Fahrenheit 9/11, this Watergate-style investigation into the manner in which he’s alleged to have dodged the Vietnam draft by joining the Texas National Guard between 1968 and 1974 – and then going AWOL – seems an arguably trivial afterthought.
Considering Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which radicalised so many sections of the globe – and contributed significantly to the escalation of the terrorist activities we’ve been experiencing in recent years – whatever was hushed up about him during his years in national service hardly ranks as earth-shatteringly conspiratorial.
The film explores the manner in which CBS News producer Mary Mapes (Kate Blanchett) collaborated with her 60 Minutes colleague Dan Rather (a kind of latter-day Walter Kronkite) to expose the ‘missing years’ in the ex-president’s life in a 2004 exposé.
Mapes was in receipt of some apparently damning documents that year which chronicled Bush’s less-than-exemplary record in the ‘Guard’ but questions were later asked about their authenticity. When she couldn’t answer these to anyone’s satisfaction she was sacked by CBS. Dan Rather was ‘side-lined’, resulting in a breach of contract lawsuit from him which was thrown out by the courts.
Engrossing and all as the film is, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of ‘so whatness’ about it. A kind of All the President’s Men for the Microsoft age, it has Mapes going from the euphoria of believing she’s ‘nailed’ Bush and his protective cronies with her Sherlock Holmes-ing to the dawning realisation that her story has holes in it. A number of vested interests queue up to discredit her as a ‘leftie’ radical and dismiss the documents as nothing more than clever forgeries.
Even if such documents were genuine, and the film leaves one thinking they were, this still doesn’t rate very high on the scale of national scandals, especially in the light – or rather darkness – of Bush’s subsequent adventures in the Middle East, which had many people calling for him to be indicted for war crimes. To that extent the film is a storm in a teacup.
Its final pre-credit hosanna to Mapes for a later documentary comes across as special pleading. To be sure, she was a highly-principled reporter who was shabbily treated by CBS but was she an Erin Brockovich? A Karen Silkwood? Hardly.
Having said that, Ms Blanchett – looking more like Christine Lahti than herself – serves up yet another bravura performance here without that much to work with. (She’s as good as she was in Carol). A grizzled-looking Robert Redford (finally starting to show his age after being a pretty boy for so many decades) is more wooden as Rather.
The bullet-headed Stacy Keach builds on the autumnal resurgence to his career kickstarted by Nebraska to play the would-be ‘secret source’ Mapes eventually has to ‘out’ to her chagrin before he unwittingly puts a nail in her journalistic coffin.
Good ***
photo: CNS