noah wyle Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The political drama has a good friend in Rod Lurie, who makes intelligent, earnestly liberal movies that are meaty and watchable, if not always great. He has a thing for strong female protagonists, too. He was first noticed for The Contender, about a female vice-presidential candidate being grilled about her past, and he created the lady-president TV drama Commander in Chief for ABC. His latest, a spiritual sister to The Contender, is the arbitrarily titled Nothing But the Truth, in which thorny ethical dilemmas once again mess up the life of a woman.

She is Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), a Washington D.C. newspaper reporter who learns that America's recent missile strike against Venezuela may have been unjustified. It was done in retaliation for that country's supposed involvement in an assassination attempt against the U.S. president, but Rachel has learned that a CIA agent filed a report indicating Venezuela was not to blame -- a report that the president ignored, ordering the military strike anyway.

Rachel's news story makes waves in Washington, not just for its damning evidence against the president, but for outing the CIA agent who made the report. She is Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga), the wife of an ambassador and supposedly just an ordinary soccer mom. Her undercover profession as a government spy is over now, of course; nobody wants a spy whose name has been plastered all over the news.

Now the question is which high-level government employee leaked Erica's identity to the press? A special prosecutor named Dubois (Matt Dillon) is appointed to find out; Rachel refuses to reveal her sources; Rachel is held in contempt of court and sent to jail; stubbornness and principle-upholding ensue.

I'm excited enough that Rod Lurie is returning to politics with Nothing but the Truth, a film loosely associated with the story of Valerie Plame. But I'm becoming more excited that it will feature a wide range of talented actors, from Kate Beckinsdale to Alan Alda to Matt Dillon to Vera Farmiga to David Schwimmer to Edie Falco to Harry Lennix to the just-announced Angela Bassett and Noah Wyle. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Basset and Wyle join the ensemble as supportive figures. Bassett is to play editor-in-chief to Beckinsdale's reporter and Wyle is to play the lawyer defending Beckinsdale's character, who ends up in jail for not revealing a source.

More than 13 years after being nominated for an Oscar (for What's Love Got to Do with It), I'm happy to see Bassett getting more meaty roles. In addition to this part, which will probably be too small to garner too much recognition, she is set to star opposite Don Cheadle as the titular wife in the biopic Toussaint, and she's sure to be seen by millions and millions in Tyler Perry's next movie, Meet the Browns. Wyle, too, is deserving of making his mark on the big screen now that he's done playing Dr. Carter on E.R. Coming up for him is a father role in the 1963-set coming-of-age film Boy of Pigs and his directorial debut, a romantic comedy titled Prince Test.

The interesting thing about Nothing but the Truth is it somewhat seems to combine Lurie's The Contender (possibly my favorite political film ever), which also focused on a woman under heavy scrutiny, and his recent box office disappointment Resurrecting the Champ, which similarly dealt with the world of journalism. For the sake of this great cast, I hope Nothing but the Truth is closer to the success level of the former.

Actor Noah Wyle, alumni of television's hit hospital drama ER, and more recently star of TNT's rip-offs of homages to Raiders of the Lost Ark known as The Librarian: Quest for the Spear and Return to King Solomon's Mines, is set to make his feature directorial debut with the romantic comedy Prince Test for Dolphin Entertainment and producers Peter Sussman, Arthur Sarkissian and Morris Levy. The film, written by first-timer and recent USC film grad Rachel Weinhaus (with a rewrite by J.P. Manoux), centers on a female private investigator who uses somewhat unorthodox and deceptive techniques to gauge the fidelity of the married men she investigates.

Wyle, who's other acting credits include some pretty good work as Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley, Enough and one of my favorite films, Donnie Darko, is, of course, an unproven director. Add to that a script that, while it has a somewhat interesting premise, was nevertheless written by someone with no prior feature credits or experience. Even the person they tapped to do the rewrite doesn't have any feature credits. I don't know about you, but to me this project is really starting to sound like a bad idea with a pretty good chance of failure. I realize that people have to start somewhere and everyone is a first-timer at one point, but usually when the director has never directed before, producers will often have a writer on-board with a little experience under his or her belt -- just to give the project a fighting chance of success.

As the film is being financed by freshman feature backers Dolphin Entertainment (who are primarily known for their TV movies) and, as an indie production, most-likely has a relatively small budget, I guess Dolphin feels an unproven director and writers are worth the financial risk. But really, who knows what their reasons are? Whatever they might be, I really hope they know something I don't know -- for their sake. No word on casting for Prince Test (which, if they get the right actors, would help) but production is set to begin this April in Chicago.