New Spielberg film riveting and compelling because it’s relevant
The Post might be drawing an older crowd, but it strikes a chord with link to past
The theatre was packed.
It was 4 p.m. on a Sunday, a time when multiplexes screening adult films are notoriously vacant, yet almost every seat was taken.
Not by the young people Hollywood relies on to boost its bottom line with a never-ending cascade of hyperventilating superhero flicks.
By old people — and by old, I mean over 40 — who don’t usually go to movies and when they do, would opt for a more sedate rep house.
But there they were, en masse, for The Post, a film that at first glance seems like yet another Meryl Streep prestige flick, no different than August: Osage County, Florence Foster Jenkins or the 20 that came before — films everyone raves about but no one (other than your grandmother) goes to see.
What’s more, it’s about a historical moment — 47 years in the past — and if I tried to explain the nuances of that in a newspaper column it would put everyone to sleep.
But like last year’s Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures — a U.S. space race flick with a compelling underdog perspective — director Steven Spiel- berg has done something as paradoxical as it is triumphant.
He’s married political events from a half-century ago to things happening now outside our door in a way that feels fresh, immediate, instantly compelling.
Nixon = Trump In the film’s depiction of Tricky Dick’s punitive attempts to stop the release of incriminating government documents by the Washington Post, we hear the echo of Donald Trump’s unhinged rants about “fake news,” including the Fake News Awards he recently presented this week to, among others, the Washington Post.
Katharine Graham = #MeToo The plight of the timid Post publisher — who struggles to find her voice in a sea of male condescension — links directly to the current movement demanding that women’s voices be heard and respected.
“Thank you, Arthur, for your frankness,” Streep’s middle-aged doyenne tells one of the yammering male underlings telling her how to do her job. She’s not really grateful to this braying billy goat who confides that, confidentially ma’am, none of us men who work for you give a crap what you think.
But this is 1971, when women — even those in power — didn’t have a voice. So she sucks it up, biding her time. And when the film’s twin strands of topicality collide in a court judgment that allows the Post to publish docs that reveal the government has been lying about the Vietnam War, it’s a victory not only for freedom of the press, but for Graham’s own pride and self-respect.
In a poignant epitaph, she descends the Supreme Court steps to find herself surrounded by a throng of adoring young women gazing at her with glowing respect. Yeah, I know: it never happened. But that isn’t the point. Like Wonder Woman doffing her civilian duds to reveal an armoured bodice as she plows through enemy lines, it’s a moment that makes grown women (and probably a few men) choke up.
“People may say I am hammering the point too hard,” Spielberg told the U.K.’s Times. “But, to me, you sometimes have to be a little loud in this day and age.”
Make no mistake: The Post is no E.T. or Jurassic Park.
With its labyrinthine subject matter, verbal exposition and thematic resemblance to the Oscar-winning journalism flick Spotlight, no one expected it to be anything more than just OK.
What you don’t expect is the gleeful exhilaration in seeing newspapers the size of bath towels churning off a production line, the thin waft of cigarette smoke that hovers like a dense fog, the clattering of loose change into pay phones by journalists angling for a scoop.
You don’t expect Tom Hanks to be so craggily charming as editor Ben Bradlee or Streep’s Graham to exude such disarming vulnerability as she navigates the treacherous waters of male patriarchy.
Mostly, you don’t expect what firsttime screenwriter Liz Hannah describes as “a script about two people in their 50s in which no one kisses each other” to achieve liftoff the way it does, to leave you cheering.
But that full house on a Sunday afternoon was no accident.
Nor was the fact this pointed meditation on the tempestuous nature of democracy ranked higher at the box office than less cerebral newcomers with much bigger ad campaigns: Paddington 2, Proud Mary and The Commuter.
In the end, the world’s most successful director has done the unthinkable, transforming his wired, Fight the Power movie into a cinematic underdog.
There are other films that speak to the moment: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for one, with Frances McDormand ranting about racism and sexism as a grieving mother who wages war against a small-town police chief.
But Spielberg — blurring the line between past and present — has gone further, lobbing the first volley in a nascent revolution that promises to reshape American culture.
“I knew when I took on this movie — because I am known as a member of the Hollywood liberal elite — there would be tons of labelling of myself and Meryl and Tom and the movie as partisan propaganda,” he told the Times.
“But this isn’t partisanship. I really feel that patriotism is bipartisan — and I’m patriotic about my film.” Joel Rubinoff writes for the Waterloo Region Record. Email him at jrubinoff@therecord.com