Colleen Hoover’s new adaptation is ridiculous, but none of the people involved can agree on how ridiculous it is.
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
I left Truth with so many questions and no idea who I would direct them to if given the chance. Should it be best-selling author Colleen Hoover, who wrote the 2018 novel on which the film is based — a lurid thriller about, as it happens, a best-selling author as well as the ghostwriter hired to take over her job when that author is incapacitated after a car accident? Should it be screenwriter Nick Antosca, who managed to turn what was already a convoluted gothic romance into something even less plausible and more confusing on screen? Or should it be director Michael Showalter, who is somehow in a pitched battle with Paul Feig to become our leading director of girl-lit adaptations and who maintains a tone of overheated but knowing fun for a while before letting it all collapse into a giant pile of what the hell? The one who is to blame Truththe result is the kind of movie that makes you hang around in a stunned silence that lingers until, halfway home, you pull yourself together enough to turn to your companion and ask, “So…why…?”
Truth is named after Verity Crawford – played by Anne Hathaway, closing out her epic year with a whimper after playing a pop star and Andy Sachs again and fending off hordes of unwanted suitors and unexpected dinosaurs. Here, she is a famous novelist whose work, we are constantly told, is shit shitreally dark stuff but still popular enough to get her involved The hot ones And Call her daddy and buy him the modernist equivalent of a spooky lakeside mansion in which every room seems to have a fireplace and a place to chat. But the film’s main character is a much less famous writer named Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who works in the same genre (“dark”?) but has been struggling to get by until she and her agent are called to a meeting at Hachette about a lucrative secret project. Verity is indisposed and her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), is looking for someone to take over his show and come stay at their Vermont home and look through his wife’s many notes and plans. Before being introduced to the meeting, Lowen and Jeremy have what amounts to a horrible encounter on the street, when a bike messenger is mowed down by a car in front of them and Jeremy lends Lowen his shirt because it is covered in blood. After that, how could they not fall in love?
Truth could be considered a little brother or sister The cleaning lady And A simple favor with its mix of hideous lifestyle porn, forbidden lust and outrageous twists. But it makes more sense to consider him as a kind of Temu Rebecca passing through Jane Eyre. Lowen is the literary equivalent of a governess, hired to take charge of a body of writing rather than the Crawfords’ only remaining child, Crew (Brady Wagner), whose twin sister drowned in an accident that sparked the family’s tragedies. Verity is the mysterious, perhaps villainous, first wife, a larger-than-life figure who casts a shadow over the house even as her contemporary reality is that of a catatonic invalid who can neither speak nor move, and who is cared for by a disturbing nurse named Anna (Irina Dvorovenko, basically a red herring). And Jeremy is the handsome figure, the seemingly enduring dreamboat of a husband who may or may not harbor more ominous intentions. Soon after, Lowen tries on Verity’s business while reading a hidden manuscript presented as an autobiographical confession of all of the author’s nastiest inner thoughts. She begins to believe that Verity fooled the world into thinking she had everything when in reality she was a nightmare – then she begins to suspect that the other woman isn’t hurt at all.
The problem with Truth isn’t it ridiculous, it’s because no one agrees on how ridiculous this situation is. Johnson does the sneaky, half-assed thing she does when she wants to signal that she’s on top of the subject – which is funny about something like Madame Web but here it just feels like she’s making a joke at the audience’s expense. Hathaway, meanwhile, throws herself wholeheartedly into her role (of course) but works with a character that, even allowing for intentional ambiguity, cannot make sense. Hartnett brings none of the nastiness that made up his performance in Trap so much fun, just appearing so flat on screen even though his character has to navigate some wild turns. And Showalter can’t make the ridiculousness of the final act work, as if he himself is having trouble keeping up with all the twists and turns the story throws up. I can’t blame him, when the script seems to go out of its way to make plot developments incomprehensible. There’s a sequence involving the use of a baby monitor that renders the whole act of DIY surveillance pointless, and a story about the recent death of Lowen’s cancer-stricken mother that’s meant to emphasize his mental state but feels oddly extraneous because Lowen doesn’t seem to have any emotions about his late parent. Truth has one foot planted in a grounded reality and the other in an absurd reality, and the result is that he finds himself doing a very painful version of the splits.
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