Dennis Quaid wears an unidentified watch

In a CBS newsroom packed with monitors and desks, Lt. Col. Roger Charles stands at the back of the team, hands on his hips, a watch at the wrist beneath a rolled plaid sleeve. Dennis Quaid plays Charles in Truth, the 2015 film about the 2004 CBS report that questioned George W. Bush's National Guard service and collapsed when the documents behind it could not be authenticated, ending Dan Rather's anchor career and producer Mary Mapes's.

Charles is the military analyst Mapes brings onto the team, the steady veteran among the journalists, and Quaid plays him as the room's most grounded conscience as the story comes apart. The watch sits in shadow at his wrist in the ensemble frame, never turned to the camera, so the dial and maker go unread and the brand is unidentified.

Truth is a film about evidence and what counts as proof, fought out in newsrooms like this one, and Charles is the one who keeps insisting the underlying story was true even after the documents meant to prove it fell apart. That distinction, between a true story and a provable one, is the film's whole subject, and it cost Mapes and Rather their jobs.