Spielberg’s lesson in REAL news
THE title character in Steven Spielberg’s new thriller is a newspaper, which might not sound to everyone like the stuff of which thrills are made. A fondly-remembered 1976 movie about the same newspaper, the Washington Post, was more racily called All The President’s Men.
Of course, for those of us who work for them, hardly anything could be more thrilling than newspapers.
Last week, I went to the premiere of The Post and to the after-show party, which was full of well-known media folk buzzing around excitedly, having just had their entire careers validated by the great Spielberg and his mighty stars, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.
One veteran radio presenter seemed in danger of combusting with self-importance. So maybe journalists aren’t the best qualified people to review The Post, which is about the value of bold journalism.
Moreover, it is not only a thriller about the risk the paper took in publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers in 1971, but also a romance about the heady days of hot metal and typesetting by hand.
The Pentagon Papers were classified documents, thousands of pages of them, which revealed lots of damning details about the still-raging Vietnam War that the US government had kept secret — not least the conviction in the highest political echelons, even as more military personnel were packed off to fight, that the conflict could never be won.
That’s the essence of the story, with the Washington Post having to judge whether the cause of public interest was worth going into battle itself, with the Nixon White House.
But it’s not at all fanciful — in fact, Spielberg more or less confirmed it at the premiere — to also see the film as a two-hour rebuke to Donald Trump for his shrill cry of ‘fake noos’ every time the media says something he dislikes.
EVEN as a newspaperman, though, I’ll try to be objective and resist the urge to stand up and salute as I write that The Post, rather like the brilliant 2015 movie Spotlight (cowritten by Josh Singer, who is also the co-writer here with Liz Hannah) affirms the importance to a society of any institution which shines the dazzling torch of truth into the murky broom cupboards of corruption, conspiracy and cover-up.
I don’t think this is quite a great film, however, so much as a good film with great things in it. Unsurprisingly, with 25 Academy Award nominations already among them, these include one splendid performance of Streepish intensity and another of Hanksian integrity.
Streep plays Katharine Graham, the well-connected socialite who owned the Post, which she inherited from her father. Her husband had taken the reins but committed suicide some years earlier, leaving her nominally in charge.
But as the whistle-blowing drama unfolds, the company is going public and Graham is trying, uneasily, to assert her authority over some stuffy bow-tied reactionaries in the boardroom. Streep plays her beautifully, as a woman of strong principle but nervy conviction.
Hanks is the paper’s editor, Ben Bradlee. As it happens, I spent an hour interviewing Bradlee myself in the early 90s, in his office at the Post so I can testify to the accurate way in which Hanks growls and plonks his expensive brogues up on his desk.
I can still recall wincing when I realised that the microphone on my tape-recorder was pointing directly at the bottom of his shoe.
Bradlee was a Harvard-educated patrician, born into New England wealth and privilege, but also as tough and salty-tongued as a stevedore.
Nobody will ever play him better
than Jason Robards in All The President’s Men, who had the advantage of looking strikingly like him, but Hanks gives it his considerable The picture erable bestshot. revolves around the relationship between Bradlee and Graham, which is founded on immense mutual respect but also her willingness to let him get on with the job as he thinks best. The Pentagon Papers, leaked to the Post by former State Department employee Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), threaten the latter part of this equation. Bradlee aggressively wants to publish, partly to get one over on the rival New York Times, which also has the papers but is gagged by a White House injunction. Graham, thinking of the Post’s future, is much more circumspect.
She is also compromised by her close friendship with the former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) whose reputation seems certain to be damaged, if not destroyed, by the documents.
The first third or so of the movie gets a little bogged down in scenesetting, beginning with a flashback to Ellsberg’s own visit to the Vietnam front line in 1966.
Unless you’re already wellacquainted with the story, it’s pretty challenging to follow, until it smooths out into a will-they-won’tthey narrative which Spielberg masterfully ensures is not undermined by us knowing, or being able to guess, the ending. Coincidentally, his own feature-length directing debut, Duel, came out in the same year as the Pentagon Papers, but if the subsequent 47 years have taught us anything about him, it’s that he doesn’t need sinister trucks, or even great white sharks, to generate suspense.
In this film, what he mostly needs are telephones, which he also uses shamelessly to convey a sense of period.
‘Could I trouble you to use your telephone?’ asks Graham at one point; eight words which whisk us back into that dim past before mobiles.
Later, Bob Odenkirk — terrific as the reporter Ben Bagdikian who tracks Ellsberg down — has almost slapstick fun trying to get coins into a payphone. We also hear Nixon himself, the real Nixon, thundering paranoiacally into his Oval Office phone.
In fact, the Pentagon Papers don’t implicate him; they cover a period before he became President.
But Spielberg doesn’t let him off the hook, either telephonically or morally.
The film ends with a break-in at the Democratic Party HQ in the Watergate building, allowing us all the smug satisfaction of knowing what happens next.