HOLD THE FRONT ROW!
Spielberg brilliantly evokes the golden age of newspapers – so book your seat now
Every year there is a big film that underperforms come awards time, and this year it’s beginning to look like it might be The Post. Despite starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks and being directed by the great Steven Spielberg, it won no Golden Globes (it was nominated for six) and failed to secure a single nomination either for the Baftas or the Screen Actors’ Guild awards, which are handed out tonight.
All, however, is not yet lost: the Oscar nominations are announced on Tuesday and in a normal year, Streep has to do little more than cough to get herself on the list. Maybe The Post will be the film that comes with a late run… maybe.
Nevertheless, I braced myself for disappointment as I finally got to see it myself. And you can soon see the problem, particularly facing nonAmerican audiences. This is a very American story involving American newspapers (The Washington Post, in particular), American politics and an American war (Vietnam), all of which came together almost five decades ago.
Given that it’s set during the troubled presidency of Richard Nixon, the obvious comparison is with All The President’s Men, the film about that other great Nixon-era scandal, Watergate. But that picture, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, was released just two years after Nixon finally resigned. Superficially, The Post has nothing like the same immediacy.
But only superficially, because what Post undoubtedly has is context – really powerful context. Forty-seven years after The Washington Post published the so-called Pentagon Papers, there is another paranoid bully in the White House, press freedom is under real threat and the US capital is awash with lies, slander and allegations of ‘fake news’. Nixon would have felt at home. It’s this contemporary resonance that gives The Postits‘oomph’. The So what were the Pentagon Papers? Essentially, they were made up of a hugely sensitive piece of political research which showed that the American White House, under a succession of presidents, had not only known that the Vietnam War was unwinnable but had actively and secretly expanded the scope of the war during that time. Given that there was scarcely a family in America that hadn’t sent a father, son or brother to the war, tens of thousands of whom had been killed or injured and that the war was still being fought, this was incendiary stuff. No wonder the papers were stolen by an appalled whistleblower, no wonder Nixon wanted to keep them out of the newspapers, and no wonder the soon-to-be legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee was determined to publish them. This is a film that will delight newspaper journalists. Like Spotlight, the Oscar-winning picture from 2015 about the The Boston Globe’s exposé of a Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal, The Post captures not only the excitement of a paper on the trail of a big story – ‘My God, the fun,’ Bradlee enthuses – but also evokes a bygone era of typewriters, hot metal and those strange vacuum tubes that used to whizz our carefully sub-edited copy down to the composing room. I can see that a civilian audience might be at least one star less excited,
despite the undoubted quality of Hanks’s likeable performance as Bradlee. I warmed less to Streep’s, as the well-connected owner and publisher of the Post, Katharine Graham. It’s a characteristically mannered, nervy, twitchy Streep
turn, portraying a woman short
on confidence, long on indecision and constantly bullied by her male subordinates.
It’s no doubt accurate – Graham admitted to such ‘shortcomings’ in her autobiography – but one of the reasons it’s being ignored so far by award juries may be that it feels like the wrong performance for these angry #MeToo times, a million miles away, for instance, from Frances McDormand’s feisty, kickmale-a** turn in Three Billboards…
There’s another problem too. In making the Pentagon Papers the focus rather than Graham (now there’s a film that could have chimed with the times), an already complex and challenging screenplay has had to accommo- date the fact that it was actually
The New York Times that broke the story first. The Post only jumped in after Nixon had served the NYT with an injunction.
Spielberg, despite occasionally directing with a slightly heavy hand, does a good job of disguising this inconvenient truth, helped undeniably by Streep as she builds to her big moment.
The Post’s finest hour – the Watergate scandal – may still have been to come but, nevertheless, this remains a serious, important and, for the most part, well-executed film. But it’s the context of today that makes it.