The Post (2017)
I’m a sucker for a good newspaper movie. You can’t beat tight shots of rumpled men (and occasional women) arguing the basic precepts of a free society cutting to antiquated printing press montages. All the President’s Men, Spotlight, Good Night and Good Luck (TV news but it still counts), Spider-Man, Newsies, it’s all good. As the national scene recoils from a premature BuzzFeed report that has only reinforced conservatives’ most paranoid “fake news” fantasies, seemed as good a time as any to check in on Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep’s salute to the ink-stained wretch, The Post. It seemed like the right day for a flashback to a simpler time when journalists had ethics, facts got checked, and presidents didn’t get away with their criminal conspiracies.
The Post isn’t the triumphant work of advocacy I expected. Reading that it was rushed into production following the 2016 election, I thought it would be a lot clearer on the points it’s trying to make. But it’s hardly applicable to the current media environment, where the Internet has given everyone a platform. It’s nostalgic for an era when journalism was an honorable if slightly disreputable profession. Its most vivid characters are patrician. It gives more time to two-faced war criminal Robert McNamara to state his case than it does whistle-blowing Daniel Ellsberg. It paints Richard Nixon as just as much of an uncomplicated supervillain as does Futurama. The bad guys are lawyers and the good guys are newspapermen, and the anti-war protesters and soldiers are background props. The movie’s sense of setting is so shallow that it opens up with a Vietnam scene set to a Creedence song, and we’re supposed to take it seriously.
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Spielberg isn’t a conservative, exactly, but he’s definitely a sentimentalist, and The Post is too fond of things that are no more. Every time a character uses a telephone, the camera zooms in on the rotary dial, as if to say, Can you believe people really used to use these? There’s three more scenes digging into the minutiae of pre-computer typesetting than there need to be, and this film is more excited about the existence of pneumatic tubes than any since Brazil. The cinematography is slightly less on the nose than the dialogue when it comes to pointing out that the times are changing. Sudden bursts of very bright color intrude the mostly drab and neutral compositions, as when a child’s bright purple ball rolls into a drawing room, or a hippie invades a beige newsroom. The director’s as good as anybody when it comes to using a complex tracking shot to inject tension into a scene of talking heads. When he surrounds his heroine, Streep’s Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, with identical dismissive male establishment figures, you get the idea before any of them speak. It’s a great deal more staged than Spotlight, and it kind of serves to the movie’s detriment that every single speaking actor is a name of some kind or another. Alison Brie is in this movie, and Bradley Whitford, and Zach Woods, and Jesse Plemons, and Sarah Paulson, and Carrie Coon. It’s not worth any of their time, except they get to say they were in a Spielberg movie. Hey, so does TJ Miller. (Spielberg, or his casting people, must watch a lot of HBO. David Costabile and Deirdre Lovejoy from The Wire are in here too.)
Speaking of HBO, The Post reunites David Cross and Bob Odenkirk as two of the more significant members of editor Hanks’ team of reporters. We all know Odenkirk can play dramatic by this point, but it’s a credit to the Mr. Show duo that they can appear in multiple scenes together and not have it be at all distracting. The pure newspaper scenes are the best sequences in The Post, as we see bits and pieces of old-fashioned journalist legwork: tracking down sources, chasing leads, digging through old documents, smoking cigarettes. It takes a master filmmaker to create momentum out of a story that doesn’t really have any conflict to speak of. We know that Post is going to run its story on the classified documents revealing US leadership had no strategy in Vietnam. We know the paper is not going to go out of business. And we also know that both Nixon and Vietnam would last a few more years despite their best efforts.
It’s still a tale worth telling, but Spielberg and his screenwriters, in their efforts to make this story set in 1971 specifically relevant to 2017, pull at the wrong threads. Graham is the main character, and the ending scenes try and sell her as a feminist pioneer. That doesn’t really land. Streep is too regal, her character too comfortable with her status, and the movie doesn’t really present her struggling enough with the decision to go through and publish the story. Her assertion of independence seems more like maintaining family tradition that making a radical breakthrough. She’s also not shown as much of an anti-war crusader, and nor is anybody else. The Post’s big scoop plays as a business decision for Graham, and a chance to get one over on the hated New York Times for Ben Bradlee (Hanks) and his reporters. The only true believer in evidence is Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), who gets left behind once the critical documents leave his possession.
A few years ago I read the real Ellsberg’s memoir with interest. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is a nakedly self-serving book that’s still more intriguing than The Post even with its bias. Ellsberg was a military-industrial complex technocrat who found enlightenment, or at least that’s how he likes to present himself. The reality is more squishy. He’s something of a Walter White figure, an arrogant sort who chafed at a job doing classified research. It bothered him that not enough people appreciated how smart he was. It’s true that he took a great personal risk in stealing the documents he did, but his motivations were far from pure. That’s something that The Post seems to know about, but it doesn’t interrogate the matter nearly as much as it should. Odenkirk’s Ben Bagdikian, when he discovers the existence of the so-called Pentagon Papers, immediately suspects that former colleague Ellsberg is the source of the leak. He’s right, of course, but the film zips past this plot point. It’s not the story of a self-aggrandizing renegade intellectual, it’s the story of a very rich lady whose father owned a newspaper. Not to minimize Graham or Streep, who’s great as always. But through my jaundiced eyes the Ellsberg enigma has much more modern relevance than the old-fashioned media baroness. The Post is a movie that wants you to get excited when you see a whole room full of people all with their heads in a newspaper. At the present time, I would respond more to a movie about a big news story that has its main focus on what the source of that story stands to gain.
