The Post
review – all the news they don’t want you to print
The Post
Mark
Kermode's film of the week
The Post
Mark
Kermode's film of the week
Steven
Spielberg’s urgent 70s-set thriller stars Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in a
timely lesson on the need for a vigilant press
Mark Kermode
Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
@KermodeMovie
Sun 21 Jan
2018 09.00 GMT
“We can’t have an administration dictating to
us our coverage just because they don’t like what we print about them in our
newspaper…” At a time when Donald Trump’s White House has declared war not
merely on the media but on “truth” itself, there’s something almost quaint
about the spectre of a corrupt US president attempting to quash a story, rather
than the entire fourth estate.
Playing
like a prequel to All the President’s Men (the final coda nods towards the
opening of Alan J Pakula’s masterpiece), Steven Spielberg’s Vietnam-era
thriller recalls the 1971 revelations of the Pentagon Papers – a devastating
internal report that detailed how “the White House has been lying about the
war”. While Nixon (making a creepy voice-cameo appearance) seethes about
“treasonable action”, newspaper editors head to the supreme court, asserting
their constitutional right to speak truth to power. Meanwhile, a
behind-the-scenes battle of the sexes rages, as the Washington Post balances
the demands of its investors with the awful truth that “the only way to protect
the right to publish is to publish!”
Spielberg
opens with a black screen (mirroring the iconic white-page opening of All the
President’s Men), which gives way to a bloody Vietnam firefight in 1966,
witnessed first-hand by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys).
Fast-forward to ’71, where Ellsberg’s leaked report (“United States – Vietnam
Relations 1945- 1967”) makes the front page of the New York Times, telling the
world that four successive administrations had misled the American public about
the war, and revealing that former secretary of defence Robert McNamara (Bruce
Greenwood) “knew we couldn’t win in 65 – that’s six goddam years ago!”
Widowed
socialite and mother of four Katharine “Kay” Graham (Meryl Streep) is a close
friend of McNamara. But she is also the proprietor-publisher of the Washington
Post, whose editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) is eager to pursue the Pentagon
Papers story, despite an injunction against the Times. “Kay throws a great
party,” says a colleague “but her father gave the paper to her husband” – a
demeaning assessment shared by many of the belligerent men who surround Graham
at work. Will she have the mettle to stand and fight for what is right, even if
doing so puts the paper’s very existence at risk?
Written by
Liz Hannah and Josh Singer (the latter’s newsworthy credits include newsroom
films Spotlight and The Fifth Estate), The Post has been described by Hanks as
a story “about the week Katharine Graham became ‘Katharine Graham’”. Certainly,
Streep’s character provides the emotional fulcrum on which the drama turns.
Time and again, Spielberg pictures her as the only woman in the room, initially
disempowered. One early boardroom scene slyly echoes the cabinet meetings of
Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady (also starring Streep), with Graham’s silence a
sharp counterpoint to Margaret Thatcher’s strident confidence. But as the story
progresses, Graham finds her own voice – hesitant at first, but increasingly
firm and forthright.
As for
Hanks, he captures the swashbuckling bravado of Bradlee (played by Jason
Robards in All the President’s Men), who realises that the cosy relationship he
has formerly shared with presidents must come to an end. With his chin-forward
stance and ready-for-action manner, Hanks seems utterly at home amid the
typewriter clatter of production designer Rick Carter’s newsroom sets. The 35mm
film stock and muted colour palette add an authentic 70s patina to the visuals,
with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s smartly choreographed cameras pursuing
the film’s protagonists through halls and corridors with efficient panache.
There’s a real frisson, too, to the printing-press scenes, as Spielberg drools
over the hot-metal mechanics of newspaper production, taking tangible delight
in the old-school workings of a Linotype machine.
 |
Steven
Spielberg: ‘The urgency to make The Post was because of Trump's administration’
The
director dropped everything – including new blockbuster Ready Player One – to
tell the story of the Washington Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon
Papers. He talks about parallels between Nixon and Trump and why Oprah Winfrey
would be a ‘brilliant’ president
by Jonathan
Freedland
Fri 19 Jan
2018 11.29 GMT First published on Fri 19 Jan 2018 06.00 GMT
Shortly
after The Sixth Sense became a global sensation, its director, M Night
Shyamalan – hailed on the cover of Newsweek in 2002 as “the next Spielberg” –
told an interviewer that, years earlier, he had realised the one ingenious
trick that made Steven Spielberg movies so spectacularly successful. Like a
soft-drink manufacturer who had stumbled on the secret recipe for Coca-Cola,
Shyamalan could not believe his luck. What was Spielberg’s killer formula,
Shyamalan was asked. He would not say. Merely by understanding it, he had
struck commercial gold and he did not plan to share it.
It didn’t
quite work out that way for Shyamalan, who has never matched the heights of
that first hit. But I thought of his imagined revelation as I watched
Spielberg’s latest film. The Post stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as Katharine
Graham and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, the duo who took on the Nixon
White House in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, the US Department of
Defense’s own secret history of the Vietnam war that laid bare decades of
government dishonesty.
It is a
timely, absorbing story, beautifully acted and masterfully told. But what is
the essential ingredient that makes it a Spielberg movie? Where is the neat
narrative trick that Shyamalan thought he had spotted, the trademark device
that means The Post sits in a canon that includes Jaws, Indiana Jones and
Schindler’s List?
Two days
later, I am sitting opposite Spielberg – now 71 and looking like a kindly
college professor, a sweater over his shirt and tie and under his jacket –
about to ask the man himself. He is the most commercially successful director
in cinema history, the man behind ET, Jurassic Park and dozens more. So what
makes a Spielberg film?
He answers
by noting that he recently saw Spielberg, a two-hour documentary by Susan Daly,
detailing each stage of his storied career. “Even having looked at that
documentary about myself, I still cannot honestly tell you what attracts me to
a project and what presses my buttons and what gets me to say yes. I can’t tell
you.”
Really? No
clue as to what the common thread that connects his work might be?
“There’s a
couple of movies that, yes, I see my dog tags around the neck of the film, like
anything that has to do with dinosaurs or intrepid archaeologists.” But more
widely? He shakes his head and smiles. “And I saw the documentary. And it
didn’t help.”
As he told
Daly, he doesn’t like to overanalyse his own work too much, for fear that the
attempt to understand the source of all this creativity might cause it to dry
up.
As it
happens, The Post has a couple of Spielberg hallmarks. There is the familiar
clash of idealism against pragmatism, the brave soul (or souls) ready to stand
up for what’s right, against the vastly bigger forces pressing them to back
down. In Bridge of Spies, Hanks was a lawyer pressured to cut corners who insisted,
instead, on the primacy of the constitution. In The Post, Hanks is a journalist
taking the same stand. (Both films join Lincoln as hymns to the virtues of the
US constitution.) And – like those fleeing the shark, the dinosaurs, or the
relentless truck in Spielberg’s debut movie, Duel – the good guys have to face
down an implacable bully.
But The
Post has an added quality that some earlier Spielberg movies may have lacked:
an uncanny topicality. That is not wholly coincidental. The director first read
the script for The Post just 11 months ago, deciding instantly that he wanted
to make this story of a Republican president at war with the press – and he
wanted to make it right now, assembling screenwriters, crew and A-list stars
(including Streep and Hanks making their first film together) in a fraction of
the usual time.
“The level
of urgency to make the movie was because of the current climate of this
administration, bombarding the press and labelling the truth as fake if it
suited them,” Spielberg tells me, recalling the sense of offence he felt at
documented, provable events being branded fake news. “I deeply resented the
hashtag ‘alternative facts’, because I’m a believer in only one truth, which is
the objective truth.”
So The Post
shows a silhouetted Richard Nixon pacing the White House, while we hear the
disgraced former president’s voice – taped on his own, notorious recording
system – as he tramples on the first amendment, seeking to use the might of his
office to hobble the free press. No one needs to mention Donald Trump for his
shadow to loom over this movie.
Journalists
will lap it up, of course. Like James Graham’s stage play Ink, it features one
sequence lovingly recreating the old process of hot metal – the clanging of
heavy, blackened machines – once necessary to produce a printed newspaper. For
those who were inspired to go into the trade by Alan J Pakula’s All the
President’s Men (“arguably the greatest newspaper movie ever made,” says
Spielberg), with its heroic tale of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposing
Watergate, The Post is a delicious prequel: it argues that the victory over the
Pentagon Papers emboldened the Washington Post to keep fighting Nixon, all the
way to his resignation in 1974. (For anyone who knew Bradlee, Hanks does not
disappoint: he gets the macho swagger of the walk, the growl in the voice, just
right.)
But
Spielberg insists his film is no nostalgia piece looking backward to the days
when US journalism was in its pomp. “I think there’s a higher standard of
journalism today than there even was then,” he says. For that he credits
today’s competitive landscape, with the Post and the New York Times jostling
daily for exclusives on the Trump White House. Back in 1971, that duel was, the
director says, “a one-way street”. Bradlee was furious that the New York Times
had beaten him to the Pentagon Papers, publishing them first. But to the Times,
the Post was a provincial, local paper – barely a rival at all.
These days,
says Spielberg, the old obstacles he details so painstakingly in his film – the
need to have enough coins in your pocket to call a source from a payphone or
the rigmarole of booking two seats on a plane to accommodate boxes filled with
secret papers – have gone. But the inky hassles of what he calls the “analogue
era of hard copy” have been replaced by new challenges, chiefly the sheer
number of breaking stories and the speed of the news cycle, “which is less than
24 hours. Sometimes it’s 24 minutes. The intensity is tenfold what it used to
be.”
If The Post
feels timely, it is not solely because Americans are witnessing anew a pitched
battle of president v press. The central human story of the film is the
transformation of Graham, the Post’s owner – who had taken the helm of the
paper only after her husband’s suicide – from a hesitant, self-doubting
Washington society hostess, into a decisive, steely woman who refuses to be
pushed around.
Accordingly,
Spielberg repeatedly shows us Graham/Streep as the only woman in a room full of
besuited men, interrupted by men, talked over and down to by men, even those
supposedly junior to her. We watch as she develops the strength finally to turn
around and say: “Enough.”
When, in
February 2017, Spielberg picked up The Post’s script, originally written by
31-year-old Liz Hannah, he can’t have known how resonant it would become.
“I didn’t
know because the sexual assault tsunami hadn’t happened yet. Of course it had
been happening for decades and decades, but this particular 8.2 earthquake had
not yet occurred.”
Was he
aware of what certain men were doing in his industry?
“Certainly
aware of the existence probably all the way back to William Shakespeare’s time
of the casting couch, and the prevalence of sexual abuse and sexual
intimidation in the old Hollywood of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.”
But he has
been a player in Hollywood for nearly 50 years. Surely he must have seen
something?
“There was
some inappropriate behaviour years and years ago inside my own company, which
we dealt with and dismissed the person involved in that. But I’ve always had
small companies with no more than 70 employees, and my companies have always
been run by women. I find when companies are run by women, there’s less of a
chance for men to get away with that kind of behaviour.”
And what
about Harvey Weinstein himself? Surely that was not a surprise? “I knew that he
was a bully, and I knew that he was a very intimidating competitor. But I
learned for the first time about his sexual proclivities when I read the [New
Yorker] story by Ronan Farrow.”
There is
one scene in The Post that Spielberg tells me he improvised on the day. Graham
is leaving the supreme court after the fateful ruling in the newspaper’s
favour. A huge crowd of anti-Nixon protesters has gathered and, as she goes down
the stairs, several young women spontaneously form a kind of guard of honour,
lining her route. It rams home the point that Graham should be seen as a
feminist role model, blazing a trail for the next generation.
Some have
found that scene a little over-egged, as if Spielberg couldn’t help but lay on
an extra coating of sentimentality. It is a familiar accusation against the
director, one that has dogged him for decades. But these days he leans into it.
He owns it. That becomes clear when I ask him why he thinks the Spielberg
biography by film critic Molly Haskell was published in Yale University Press’s
Jewish Lives series. Has his been a Jewish life? Does his work have a Jewish
sensibility?
“Well, Jews
by and large have a sentimental quality. We also love high drama. I think both
of those things are evident in most of my work.”
There’s
another way of looking at this question of sentimentality. Somehow Spielberg
manages to peer quite hard into the dark and nevertheless find a point of
light. It is wrong to think he shies away from the darkness: his subjects have
included the Holocaust, slavery and domestic violence. (In 1994, he founded the
Shoah Foundation, which is committed to recording on video the testimonies of
survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, as well as of genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia
and elsewhere.) But he also ensures that audiences leave every Spielberg film
with their spirits lifted. What is that about?
He smiles.
“Well, look. To be Jewish, you have to be optimistic, because if you’re not we
would have perished in the desert. We’d never have reached the end of that
40-year hike. We would all have perished without optimism.”
Spielberg
has plenty of it, planning for the release of sci-fi blockbuster Ready Player
One, the film he interrupted to make The Post, and scanning scripts for the
countless other movies he wants to make after that. Correction: not necessarily
movies.
“I’d like
to do a 10-hour miniseries very much,” he says when we talk about the current
surge in top-quality television. He has been looking, “but I haven’t found one
yet”. With excitement, he volunteers the titles of his current three favourite
shows: The Crown, The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies. I suggest that The
Crown is not unlike The Post: the story of a woman thrust into a powerful role
she never expected. Another smile: “I see some of the echo between Her Majesty
and Her Majesty of The Washington Post.”
We talk
about the nervy, “nerdy” boy Spielberg was as a child; the way he was bullied,
singled out for particular abuse as one of the few Jewish kids in his Arizona
suburb; about the 8mm movie camera he discovered aged 12 or 13, which became
“the antidote to being bullied”. But, before long, we are talking once more
about his country.
He is
excited about the prospect of an Oprah Winfrey run for the presidency. He
thinks she would be “absolutely brilliant”. Indeed, he refuses to sink into the
bleak despair of so many of his fellow Hollywood liberals.
“Our
country has gone through all kinds of crises, and we’ve always bounced back
from them. We are going to bounce back from this, no doubt. This is something
we will look back on, we will make movies about. We’ll tell these stories.
These will be lessons to our children of what not to do and how not to comport
oneself. But we will absolutely bounce back and we will recover. All the damage
being done today is reversible.”
He doesn’t
fear for the republic?
“At this
moment in my life right now, with all my experience behind me, no, I do not fear
for the republic.”
|
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário