FOR those who didn’t get enough of the Valerie Plame case in the first billion hours of coverage, a lightly fictionalized case turns up in the TV-ish drama “Nothing But the Truth.”
The Plame figure played by Vera Farmiga is an undercover intelligence agent whose identity is slipped to a fiercely dedicated reporter (Kate Beckinsale) who takes her personal policy of never revealing sources to the point of absurdity.
The reporter goes to jail for not talking to a special prosecutor (Matt Dillon) who applies the screws as her lawyer (Alan Alda) warns her that she’s breaking the law and her husband (David Schwimmer) cheats on her. (Wouldn’t subtracting David Schwimmer from your life be a pretty big upgrade?)
To spice up a story that was colossally overcovered the first time around – the Eternal Plame – writer-director Rod Lurie (the creator of the Geena Davis-as-president TV series “Commander in Chief”) throws in a murder, a presidential assassination plot and an embarrassing chicks-in-prison scene that seems to have been dropped in from a 1974 grindhouse flick. All of this stuff simplifies the exceedingly well-known facts of the actual mess to make it into a blaringly earnest good vs. evil parable.
The sexing up/dumbing down fails to compensate for the gobs of punishingly dull blah-blah about crusading reporters – sorry, “journalists” – who selflessly put their principles above all. “Nothing But the Truth” is like listening to the fourth-best debater in middle school present a term paper called “Politics, Power and the Media.”
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
Plames out.
Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (sexuality, profanity, violence). At the E-Walk, 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.