Start the presses!
Perfect casting, modern parallels keep The Post rolling
“Stop the presses!” It’s a great movie- cliché moment, enjoyed and employed by everyone from Michael Keaton ( in The Paper) to Gonzo ( in The Great Muppet Caper). But how often does its obverse generate the same kind of drama?
We get such a moment in The Post, Steven Spielberg’s of- themoment look at the battle between a free press and a free- swinging White House. It’s 1971, and the Washington Post is deliberating whether to publish information from the Pentagon Papers, a topsecret study of the Vietnam War.
At the 11th hour ( actually a quarter past midnight), the editor, played by Tom Hanks, picks up a phone and calls the press room. “It’s Ben Bradlee,” he barks. Run it.” A startled copy editor answers: “Yessir. Start it up!” A pressman pushes a big green button. There’s a buzz, and the jolt of a generator kicking in. And then the whole building starts to shake, including the newsroom, several floors up.
Philip L. Graham, one- time publisher of the Post, liked to call newspapers “the first rough draft of history.” By contrast, the Pentagon Papers, collected under the aegis of U. S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, were meant to be a final draft, kept under wraps until the Vietnam War really
was history.
“The study was for posterity,” says Bruce Greenwood, whose resemblance to McNamara is eerie. “It was written for academics in the future. The papers can’t be objective.”
Secret or not, objective or not, the Pentagon Papers became frontpage news in The New York Times on June 13, 1971, when reporter Neil Sheehan published the first of many stories about how the administration had lied to the U. S. public for decades about its involvement in Southeast Asia, and its hopes and chances of success.
The Times may have broken the story, but the Post was quick to catch on and catch up. Reporter Ben Bagdikian ( Bob Odenkirk) got in touch with suspected whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg ( Matthew Rhys), who had worked as a military analyst in Vietnam and who “doved pretty hard” at what he saw. His calls from a pay phone next to a grubby concrete parking garage is clearly meant to evoke the Watergate scandal, still more than a year in the future.
The scrambling to locate the documents, unravel the mystery and shine a light on shady doings is pure cinematic catnip to those who love a good journalistic drama. ( Awards catnip, too: See 2015’ s best picture winner Spotlight.) But The Post is also a story about the uneasy chumminess between the powerful people who run the media and the powerful people on whom they report.
This brings us to Kay Graham ( Meryl Streep), widow of Philip L. Graham; she took over the position of publisher in 1963 after he committed suicide, and counted McNamara and other Washington political elites among her friends. This puts her in a difficult position when Bradlee wants to pursue the Pentagon Papers story; quite aside from the possibility that publication would amount to treason, or that the information could endanger U. S. lives overseas, she has no desire to harass her friends.
But the screenplay, by Josh Singer ( co- writer of Spotlight) and firsttimer Liz Hannah, doesn’t make the choice too simple. Bradlee could have been written as a man of the people. Instead, we’re told he was close to John F. Kennedy ( he calls him “Jack”) when JFK was president. Though in a marvellous scene, accompanied by a fantastic slow push in by the camera, Bradlee declares that, “the way they lied, the way they lied, those days have to be over.”
Watching Streep and Hanks hash out what they’re going to do is so entertaining it’s a wonder it’s not illegal. How have these two never shared the screen before? As publisher, Graham is shown deferring to her ( male) lieutenants before realizing that, if she’s going to run a paper that she can be proud of, she’s going to have to risk it all to do the right thing. “My decision stands,” she says in one vital scene. “And I’m...” — What? What will she do next? — “I’m going to bed.”
The Post was completed with an almost journalistic speed and sense of resolve — Spielberg read the screenplay in February, started shooting at the end of May and had the final cut ready on Nov. 6, with the rousing John Williams score added a week later. The urgency might seem odd for a film about events of almost 50 years ago, but for the parallels with today’s tussle over history in all its drafts, first, second and final.
When we hear Nixon ( the film used his actual recordings) railing against the Post and telling an aide their reporters are to be banned from the White House, it’s impossible not to imagine a president flailing about over “fake news” and demanding that reporters be fired for disagreeing with him.
The Post also functions as a kind of prequel to another great journalistic story — 1976’ s All the President’s Men. When the film ends with a shot of a shadowy figure breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee with a flashlight in the dead of night, the subtext is clear: You ain’t seen nothing yet. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm