In the run-up to the new year, Turner Classic Movies featured films with actors who left us in 2023. One of them was Melinda Dillon, who played “Honey” in the original 1962 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and won an Oscar for best supporting actress in  Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1977 Dillon appeared with Paul Newman in Slap Shot and in 1981 joined him again in Absence of Malice. Absence of Malice was the one TCM picked for its year-end tribute to Dillon, but the story of the Sydney Pollack-directed thriller about the consequences of “fake news” is truly timeless.

For a dramatization of the consequences of fake news, Absence of Malice is hard to top. Newman’s performance drew an Academy Award nomination for best actor, but he lost to Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond. Melinda Dillon lost to Maureen Stapleton for Stapleton’s role in Warren Beatty’s Reds, a leftist hagiography of the kind that is still made in Hollywood today, 2015’s Trumbo, about Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, being but one of many examples.

Absence of Malice takes place down in Miami, where union boss Joey Diaz has been murdered but police have no suspects. Prosecutor Elliot Rosen (Bob Balaban) is looking for somebody to frame. His target of choice is liquor distributor Michael Gallagher, played by Newman. Rosen leaks a fake story that Gallagher, son of a deceased bootlegger, is under investigation in the Diaz case.

Miami Standard reporter Megan Carter (Sally Field) picks up the story and consults Davidek, the paper’s attorney, played by John Harkins. “As a matter of law,” he explains, “the truth is irrelevant. We have no knowledge the story is false, therefore we’re absent malice. We’ve been both reasonable and prudent, therefore we’re not negligent. We can say what we like about him. He can’t do us harm. Democracy is served.”

At the time Diaz was killed, Carter learns, Gallagher had taken his devout Catholic friend Teresa Perrone, played by Dillon, to Atlanta for an abortion. When Carter includes that detail about the abortion in her newspaper article, Perrone first tries to gather all the copies of the newspapers from her neighbors to conceal her shame, then she kills herself. When Megan Carter gets the news, she dares to approach Gallagher, who explodes. Here is Newman at his finest.

“What the hell are you doing here? Details? Is that what you want? They found her naked in a tub. She didn’t even want to make a mess! No water, just naked. Are you interested?”

Gallagher leaves Carter in a disheveled heap, but she returns.

“Couldn’t you see what it meant to her?” Gallagher says. “Didn’t you like her?”

The guilt-stricken Carter then exposes Rosen as the source of the leak. The grieving Gallagher, his business and reputation in ruins, makes a plan.

He tells district attorney Quinn he will find out what he can about Diaz if Quinn will publicly drop the investigation. At the same time, Gallagher makes anonymous donations to Quinn’s campaign for mayor. Rosen thinks it’s a bribe and leaks the story to Carter who goes with it.

Enter James A. Wells assistant U.S. attorney general, wonderfully played by Wilford Brimley.

Rosen thinks he has a case and Wells asks him to make it. Rosen shows Gallagher his checks to the Committee for a Better Miami, which backs Quinn. Gallagher said he sent them “because they do good work.” Rosen asks Gallagher why he made the donations anonymously.

“Because I wanted them to be anonymous,” Gallagher explains.

Rosen can’t prove that Gallagher intended to bribe Quinn. Gallagher is duly cleared but the damage is done and Teresa Perrone is dead. Carter testifies that Rosen leaked the story.

“We can’t have people go around leaking stuff for their own reasons,” Wells says. “It ain’t legal, and worse than that, by God it ain’t right.” Now there is a creed for the current U.S. Department of Justice. For this crew, as with the establishment media, the truth of a story is irrelevant.

Wells asks Rosen what he plans to do after government service. Rosen says he’s not going anywhere but Wells tells him “you got 30 days.” In other words, “you’re fired,” words seldom heard in the halls of government, whatever misconduct might be involved.

And in Hollywood, screenwriters are unlikely to take on something like the Russia hoax, fake news of greater magnitude, with truth an early casualty. So good to have Absence of Malice, cinéma vérité on a difficult subject, and setting a high standard for performance. As 2024 fades in, the cast needs revision.

Sally Field carries on at 77 and Bob Balaban at 78. Wilford Brimley, best known for Cocoon, stepped off the set in 2020 at age 85.

The great Paul Newman passed away in in 2008 at 83, the same age as Melinda Dillon when she departed last January. Rest in peace and thanks for the memories.