‘Rather’ Review: Frank Marshall’s Dan Rather Doc Is a Solid Primer (But Not Much More)

Daniel Fienberg
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With a running time of 96 minutes, Frank Marshall’s Rather, a documentary about the life and times of Dan Rather, is premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival opposite Luke Korem’s Milli Vanilli, a 106-minute documentary about the life and times of Milli Vanilli. I know that both documentaries exist in their own vacuums and the comparison is apples to rutabagas, but I’m still confident in saying this: A definitive documentary about Dan Rather is going to require more time to properly tell its story than a definitive documentary about Milli Vanilli.

In its home stretch, Rather mentions that for a young generation weaned on social media, Dan Rather is an amusingly cantankerous Twitter truth-teller, but those new fans have very little awareness that he was once a revered (and briefly disgraced) journalist and broadcast nightly news anchor. Leaving aside that those Rather-adoring whelps similarly don’t know what “broadcast” or “nightly news” are, Rather is a documentary for them.

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Rather is fine. It’s not definitive.

With somewhat strange and needless circling around in time, Rather traces its hero’s journey from Texas radio to early television breaks covering Hurricane Carla and the Kennedy assassination to his time as a dogged Vietnam and White House reporter to his preeminence at the CBS anchor desk and on 60 Minutes to his fall from grace and unlikely resurrection.

Rather himself is a consistent presence across the documentary, which captures him going to and from work in a rainstorm and playing around on his computer. He sat for what looks to be several interviews. No amount of access changes the fact that while Rather is clearly an astonishingly sharp 91, he’s a somewhat bland interview subject, offering more generic platitudes and canned responses than the sort of folksy yarns his devotees might be hoping for. That version of Rather might have inspired Marshall to push the documentary toward more visual flair or take more structural liberties.

You want Rather to tell stories that get down in the muck of Vietnam or to capture the elation of a testy back-and-forth with Richard Nixon, and for Marshall to aesthetically follow him there. Instead you get what could be excerpts from a book-on-tape.

Or sometimes even less than that. When the documentary invariably covers less adulatory chapters in his career — an ill-fated on-air exchange with George H.W. Bush or the documents scandal that ended his time at CBS — he’s either silent or fuzzy in his reflections.

Marshall’s roster of talking heads is acceptable for the purpose, but individuals fall into assigned roles early and often. Robin Rather, Dan’s daughter, is there for personal details Dan would prefer not to share himself; she seems to begin every quote with, “The thing people don’t understand about my father…” or “My father is all about…” only to give information in exclusively broad strokes. Dan Rather, we learn from her, is deeply religious, deeply committed to journalism and deeply committed to his family, though it’s rare that there are colorful anecdotes to add to these contentions.

Longtime CBS News veteran Susan Zirinsky, one of many Rather colleagues, is the source Marshall turns to whenever Rather did something wrong. Zirinsky is candid about the missteps that torpedoed the notorious story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, but she’s candid in the softest way possible, one of several people who want to underline the irony that the ill-fated story was basically right, even if a key document was fraudulent.

At least Rather is awash in spectacular archival footage of the sort that never gets old, whether it’s the aforementioned bantering with Nixon or dispatches from a robust and vibrant young Rather embedded with troops in Vietnam. There’s enough material on Roger Ailes and the evolution from a neutral concept of “news” to today’s partisan landscape to understand how Rather became a polarizing figure, and the documentary deftly reminds viewers that the best of news anchors are the ones who have done the work of reporting themselves — and that Dan Rather did the work.

The documentary has folks like Rick Perlstein to give big-picture overviews and Howard Stringer to give CBS-specific overviews, but Rather is constantly opening doors partway and leaving juicier chapters for a longer and better-sourced future documentary.

I would have loved for the film to really dig in on the Brokaw/Rather/Jennings era of broadcast anchors. Marshall is able to give general points of differentiation between the three — mostly that Rather liked to travel to film from the scene of the biggest stories, while the other two were more restrained — without going deeper. Then there’s the impact Ailes and Fox News had in ending that era. Marshall definitely doesn’t ignore those things, but if Ailes is the villain of the piece — no inherent disagreement here — he’s an off-screen and under-explained villain.

There’s just a lot of media landscape stuff that Rather either can’t or doesn’t want to do justice — which returns me to my initial point that if you come from a perspective of youth this will be illuminating, but if you lived through it you’ll hardly get anything fresh at all.

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