In the four years since he was Oscar-nominated for “127 Hours’’ — and disastrously co-hosted the Academy Awards ceremony — James Franco has gone from one of our most exciting actors to an international joke.
Between highly forgettable vanity projects, which he’s been churning out at a torrid clip, Franco has essentially been playing an indifferent actor giving indifferent performances in terrible big-studio movies like “Oz the Great and Powerful” and “The Interview.”
Franco’s distancing routine helps sink “True Story,” an already turgid and tone-deaf adaptation of a self-serving memoir by a disgraced New York Times reporter (played by two-time Oscar nominee Jonah Hill) who bonds with a murderer he’s trying to exploit.
The directorial debut of British theater figure Rupert Goold seems phony from the get-go. It’s hard to imagine Hill’s sweaty hustler Mike Finkel — fired for inventing a composite character for his eighth Sunday magazine cover story — lasting six months at any American newspaper.
Then again, not many Manhattan reporters commute from a fussily decorated log cabin in Montana. Retreating there, Finkel learns that Christian Longo (Franco), charged with murdering his wife and three young children in Oregon, has been arrested on the lam in Mexico while posing as . . . Mike Finkel.
Instead of calling his credit-card company, Finkel is busying lining up an exclusive interview with his admirer Longo, and a book deal with a publisher not much concerned with Finkel’s credibility.
Anyone expecting another “Capote,” in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote may have developed an attachment to killer Perry Smith, will be sorely disappointed.
Capote wouldn’t lap up the kind of absurd alibis being dished out by Longo to an enthralled Finkel.
Nor does the jury at Longo’s trial, but the movie tries to have it both ways by labeling Finkel’s book a vehicle for self-discovery and as an indictment of his opportunism. Absolutely nothing rings true, especially a prison visit between Finkel’s wife (Felicity Jones) and Longo that was apparently invented to beef up the actress’ otherwise nothing role.
Languidly paced, “True Story: is basically a bromance with its “heroes” endlessly rehashing the gruesome details of the Longo children’s deaths. The two actors were much better together in the comedy “This Is the End,” where Franco gave his sharpest post-“127 Hours” performance as a sexually ambiguous actor named . . . “James Franco.”