Nothing But the Truth

    This film is loosely on the Valerie Plame debacle, and it offers a bit of drama for everyone: first amendment debate for the advocates of a free press at all costs, and the national security debate for those who understand that the public safety of a nation at war trumps all other issues - constitutional or otherwise.

    Valerie Plame is married to the former Ambassador to Iraq, Jo Wilson, who was very critical of the Bush administration's incursion into Iraq Theater in the World Wide War on Terror. Valerie Plame was an analyst at the CIA, who had been an operative earlier in her career. Shortly after Jo Wilson's controversial paper on Iraq's activities regarding to develop nuclear weapons, his wife was named in a Robert Novak article that Plame worked for the CIA, and arraigned her husband's trip to Iraq at the request of no apparently no one in the Bush administration. New York Times journalist Judith Miller was one of the reporters that had told Novak about Plame, and even though Miller never wrote an article on this issue, she would not give up her confidential sources and therefore served 12 weeks in jail for a contempt of court citation.

    The film's character that resembles Plame is Erica Van Doren played Vera Farmiga, whose daughter goes to a private school with Washington news reporter Rachel Armstrong, played by Kate Beckinsale: the Judith Miller character. The special prosecutor, Patton Dubois played by Matt Dillon, the Patrick Fitzgerald character; who in life was the template for Dillon's "bulldog" prosecution of Ms. Armstrong of who leaked the identity of a CIA agent to her.

There are many parallels to the Plame / Miller story, but with many exceptions and separate subplots. It is as if Director / Writer Rod Lurie took a big news story, stayed true to the plotline and then vectored many subplots from that plotline and told a similar and yet very different story where no one is the hero and no one's integrity is safe from strident examination. When the story is finished in a tight 108 minutes, we wind up with a pretty good picture.

    Rated R. Released on DVD April 28, 2009.