Film Journal January 2018

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VOL. 121, NO.1
THE POST
20TH CENTURY FOX/Color/1.85/115 Mins./Rated
PG-13
Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon,
David Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Tracy Letts, Bob
Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Jesse Plemons, Matthew
Rhys, Michael Stuhlbarg, Bradley Whitford, Zach
Woods, Jessie Mueller, Deirdre Lovejoy, Pat Healy,
Philip Casnoff, John Rue, Stark Sands, Rick Holmes,
Will Denton, Michael Cyril Creighton, Dan Bucatinsky,
Austyn Johnson.
Directed by Steven Spielberg.
Written by Liz Hannah, Josh Singer.
Produced by Kristie Macosko Krieger, Amy Pascal, Steven
Spielberg.
Executive producers: Tom Karnowski, Josh Singer, Adam
Somner, Tim White, Trevor White.
Co-producers: Liz Hannah, Rachel O’Connor.
Director of photography: Janusz Kaminski.
Production designer: Rick Carter.
Editors: Sarah Broshar, Michael Kahn.
Music: John Williams.
Costume designer: Ann Roth.
A DreamWorks, Amblin Entertainment, Pascal Pictures
and Star Thrower Entertainment production.
Spielberg’s timely Pentagon Papers drama
is packed with great performances, none
more impressive than Meryl Streep’s vulnerable
turn as Katharine Graham, the newspaper
heiress who defied the business world and
the President himself.
For his most taut and dashing movie since
Munich, Steven Spielberg chose an unlikely
subject: the publishing of the so-called Pentagon
Papers in 1971. It’s not history that Spielberg
tends to favor. There are no great battles
or monumental court cases; well, there is the
latter, but Spielberg whips right past it without
pausing for gassy Amistad oratory. The
heroes are neither grand orators nor men of
action. Instead, they’re mostly disputatious
ink-stained wretches in off-the-rack suits
mixed in with a few townhouse grandees.
Nevertheless, as uncinematic as reporting
(on smudgy old newsprint no less!) about a
bunch of Xeroxed studies done by the Rand
Corporation would seem to be, the Pentagon
Papers did arguably bring an end to the Vietnam
War and took a chunk out of President
Nixon’s hide just before Watergate brought
him down. So, yes, there’s a hell of a movie
here. And that’s before one even considers
Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.
There are two stories going on in the
screenplay deftly concocted by Liz Hannah
and Josh Singer. The first is the more obvious
history lesson. This one tells how military
analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys)—disenchanted
after having Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) agree
after a Vietnam visit in 1966 that America
wasn’t winning the war, only to see him
proclaim victory to the press—decided to
leak a classified report on the progress of the
war. Once the story breaks in 1971 that the
government knew the war was essentially lost
years earlier but kept fighting and sacrificing
thousands of young Americans to save face, it
hits like a tidal wave.
The big problem here for most of the
characters in this movie? The New York Times
got the story, not The Washington Post. This
irks Post editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), who’s
snapping at the chance to take down the Times
like a velociraptor going after a T. rex. “Any
one else tired of reading the news?” he barks
at his newsroom with the kind of gruff belligerence
that Hanks hasn’t delivered for years.
Bradlee’s eagerness to transform the Post
from a sleepy local paper into a national player
sets up the movie’s second and arguably more
interesting story. Just as Ellsberg is slipping
pages to the Times and Bradlee dispatches his
reporters to beat the bush for any crumbs of
the story to avoid getting scooped yet again,
the paper’s publisher Katharine Graham
(Streep) is undergoing her own crisis: the
public offering of her previously private family
company that runs the paper.
Streep’s Graham is a sublime creation, at
once a to-the-manner-born heiress who rules
the Georgetown cocktail circuit and a shy and
fluttery flibbertigibbet thrown off her game by
the dark-suited men telling her how to handle
the public offering. The Nixon Administration
turns its full fury on the Times, denouncing
them for publishing secret documents and
threatening legal doom to any other papers
that follow their lead; Spielberg uses real
audio of Nixon’s telephone rants about the
leaks here to frightening effect. The pressure
put on Graham by her investors ratchets up
to near panic level.
By putting so much stock in Graham’s
character, the movie keeps the audience from
too easily siding with Bradlee’s charismatic
band of pirates. As a woman in a man’s world
suspected of being in her job because the
predecessor was her deceased husband,
Graham has potentially more to lose than
anybody in the newsroom. Certainly, there’s
a chance they could all go to jail, but the
paper is her family and her legacy, not just her
job. Although there is never an instant when
the rightness of publishing stories about the
classified material in the Pentagon Papers is
seriously questioned, the movie doesn’t let us
imagine it was an easy right choice.
Spielberg plays the skittering triangulating
tensions between the government, the Post
and Graham’s investors so well it’s hard to
imagine anybody checking their watch during
this one. He’s helped along not just by the
top-line stars, but a deep bench of less glittery
talent, ranging from the various reporters
played by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross,
among others, to Graham’s advisors, particularly
Bradley Whitford and Tracy Letts (who
is quietly becoming one of Hollywood’s go-to
guys for the voice of wry wisdom).
A better thriller than Bridge of Spies and
a cracking good journalism movie, The Post
just about deserves ranking alongside All the
President’s Men and Spotlight (the latter of
which Singer co-wrote). It tells a history lesson
without much Spielbergian speechifying
and even makes a couple of pointed but subtle
notes about the glass ceiling; the scene where
Graham walks down the Supreme Court steps
through a crowd of young women watching
her with silent beaming pride is more powerful
for being so quietly handled.
There is triumph here, but it’s tempered
with a timely reminder about abuses of
power. The movie is in part about American
journalism finally coming into its own as true
investigative bloodhounds. But it also concludes
on a sobering note that will remind
audiences of their daily reality: a mad President
raging into the night. —Chris Barsanti
DOWNSIZING
PARAMOUNT/Color/2.35/Dolby Digital/135 Mins./
Rated PG-13
Cast: Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Hong
Chau, Udo Keir, Jason Sudeikis, Rolf Lassgård, Ingjerd
Egeberg, Rune Temte, Margareta Pettersson, Soren
Pilmark, Joaquim De Almeida, James Van Der Beek,
Neil Patrick Harris, Laura Dern, Niecy Nash, Margo
Martindale.
Directed by Alexander Payne.
Written by Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor.
Produced by Megan Ellison, Mark Johnson, Alexander
Payne, Jim Taylor, Jim Burke.
Executive producer: Diana Pokorny.
Director of photography: Phedon Papamichael.
70 FILMJOURNAL.COM / JANUARY 2018
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12/19/17 3:42 PM