“Any controversial story one does, involving powerful people… Eventually you’re going to have to face the furnace and take the heat,” Dan Rather explains early in Frank Marshall’s bio-documentary “Rather.” “And unless you’re prepared to do that, then you’re going to have to get another line of work.” It’s an inspiring notion—and a pointed one, based on how Rather first made his reputation and then lost it. He’s now 91 years old, an elder statesman of American journalism and a jocular presence on social media, where his down-home wisdom and pointed criticism have earned him a new generation of fans. “Do you not give a shit anymore, Dan?” he’s asked in an interview during the customary rapid-fire pre-title sequence, to which he replies, “Short answer? No.”
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The format being what it is, much of “Rather” concerns the Texas-born journalist’s history. But Marshall is also concerned with how that history intertwines with the history of journalism — and of contemporary America. For a good stretch of the 20th century, Rather was on the ground for every big story summoned up by the invocation of its era:  the civil rights struggle, the JFK assassination, Vietnam, Chicago ’68,  Watergate, Afghanistan, Tiananmen Square, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, Abu Ghraib. These aren’t just vital moments in our American story but formative experiences for him as a person.
If there’s not much in the way of new ground being broken, there is also undeniable value in hearing this history retold from his first-person perspective; this is a man who literally remembers what a burning cross smells like and who we see getting roughed up by DNC security on the convention floor (“I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan,” Walter Cronkite fumes). And the film serves as a potent and necessary reminder that, though the ferociousness of Trumpian rhetoric may be new, explicit anti-media sentiment from politicians is not. Rather’s battles with Johnson, Reagan, and Jesse Helms are noted, while his tussles with Nixon (“Rather is just a sonofabitch, isn’t he?” the president is heard asking on the Oval Office tapes, not long before the Rather home was burglarized) and Bush (with whom he had a contentious live interview during the 1988 campaign, deftly orchestrated by Roger Ailes) are given quite a bit of time.
Marshall’s choices, in terms of what to cover and at what depth, occasionally betray his baby-boomer background; there is, for example, a fair amount of longing for the good old days of the Superstar Anchorman era (without noting the white male dominance of that time). But he occasionally pauses to allow Rather to philosophize, to muse on the implications of the job and the emotional toll it takes, and those brief respites are welcome. And the structure is fairly clever, starting towards the beginning but not quite at it, jumping forward and back, hopping around enough (at least in the early passages) to keep the viewer on their toes and avoid the typical traps of the cradle-to-almost-grave profile. 
But the picture is brief (95 minutes), and though gracefully assembled and well-paced, it’s also somewhat shallow, playing in spots like a Wikipedia page that checks off the major events without really digging into them. That glancing, quicksilver approach becomes a real liability when “Rather” reaches the 2004 Bush National Guard story, introduced roughly twenty minutes before the end of the film and logging barely five minutes of screen time. That scandal—in which Rather reported a true story about George W. Bush, then running for re-election, failing to fulfill his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War, but used clearly falsified documents as proof, causing the entire story to crumble—ended his broadcast career. The journalist became the story, stumbled into what was likely an obvious trap sprung by his targets, and fell prey to a sense of inevitability. 
Yet Marshall all but glides past that controversy, treating it as a speed bump, a moment of weakness that provides the valley for the inevitable comeback to respectability and relevance. A sharper, more probing documentary would have truly interrogated the journalist ultimately responsible for such a damaging error and attempted to understand what could have led his judgment to fail him so fully, with such dire consequences. That may not have been in the cards here; “Rather” is ultimately a valentine, which is fine. But as such, it’s not as tough on Dan Rather as he would’ve been to such a subject himself. [B-]
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