Movie Review: 'The Post'

The Post (2017)

Written by: Liz Hannah and Josh Singer

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Poulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys

 

Robert McNamara: If you publish, you'll get the very worst of him, the Colsons and the Ehrlichmans and he'll crush you.

Kay Graham: I know, he's just awful, but I...

Robert McNamara: [Interrupting and getting extremely angry] He's a... Nixon's a son of a bitch! He hates you, he hates Ben, he's wanted to ruin the paper for years and you will not get a second chance, Kay. The Richard Nixon I know will muster the full power of the presidency and if there's a way to destroy your paper, by God, he'll find it.

Director Steven Spielberg’s The Post is a timely political how-they-done-it about how The Washington Post (following the lead of its much larger and more prominent rival, The New York Times) helped uncover one of the U.S. government’s deepest and darkest secrets and published the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971.

I use the word “timely” here because Spielberg chose to make this film in early 2017 (amid post-production for his current science fiction fable, Ready Player One), at a time when the current President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was complaining about “unfair” media coverage about him, his Administration, and his policies and calling newspapers like The Washington Post “enemies of the people.”

Spielberg was a young man in his 20s in 1971 and had already begun to make his mark on the filmmaking world as a director of television episodes and the TV movie Duel. He remembers the tumultuous years of the Vietnam era and the "Imperial Presidency" of Richard Milhouse Nixon, whose own bitter conflicts with the free press echo in the current era of Trump and the "Make America Great Again" crowd.

It's not surprising, then, that Spielberg jumped at the chance to make The Post his 31st feature film even though he was already hip-deep in the process of completing Ready Player One as soon as he read first-time screenwriter Liz Hannah's original script. (Josh Singer was called in to fine-tune the screenplay, but Hannah earned top billing in the credits.)

The Post begins somewhere in South Vietnam in 1966. There, a young State Department analyst (and former Marine) named Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) is on a fact-finding tour for Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara (Bruce Greenwood). Ellsberg's assignment: to determine if the current U.S. military commitment to defend South Vietnam and press North Vietnam's Communist leadership to go to the negotiation table and end the war. 

Ellsberg, outfitted with combat gear and armed with a rifle, joins a company of Marines during a night patrol in the jungle near a U.S. outpost. The patrol is ambushed and suffers heavy casualties, and Ellsberg experiences the horrors of battle up close and personal. Clearly, he realizes, the rosy reports from the generals in Saigon and the Pentagon itself are wrong. America is not winning the war, and the situation "in country" is not improving.

This prologue - similar in style to the opening of Spielberg's 2012 Lincoln - ends with a pivotal scene. On McNamara's U.S. bound military jet, Ellsberg is asked by the Defense Secretary if things are getting better on the ground in Vietnam.

Ellsberg tells McNamara and other advisers that from his point of view, the military situation is getting worse and that the U.S. is not winning the war in Vietnam.

McNamara agrees, but when the Secretary’s entourage arrives at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., Ellsberg is stunned when the former president of the Ford Motor Company and one of John F. Kennedy’s “best and brightest” Cabinet selectees claims at a press conference that the U.S. is making remarkable progress and that he thinks victory in Vietnam is at hand.

McNamara’s outright dissembling to the press and the American people troubles and disillusions Ellsberg and sets in motion the events that follow.

The Post flashes forward to 1971, when Ellsberg, now working at a government-funded think-tank called the RAND Corporation, decides to copy and disseminate the 47-volume secret history of America’s involvement in Vietnam by leaking it to The New York Times, then the biggest and most important newspaper in the country.

At the same time, Katharine “Kay” Graham (Meryl Streep) is facing her first crisis as the first woman to serve as the publisher of a metropolitan newspaper. The Washington Post was once owned by her father, Eugene Meyer, who bought the dying publication at an auction in 1933. 13 years later, Meyer handed the newspaper to Kay’s husband Philip Graham, who helped steer its growth as part of the larger Washington Post Company (which owned Newsweek magazine and several television stations in several markets) until his suicide in 1963.

Early in The Post, Spielberg, Hannah, and Singer focus on Kay’s quest to save the paper from financial failure and maintain her family’s control by taking the company public and making a stock offering in the American Stock Exchange. This sequence shows how things were back in 1971, when the newspaper industry was almost exclusively an Old Boys Group run by – and for the benefit of – wealthy white men.

During Kay’s tense negotiations with board member Arthur Parsons (Bradley Whitford) and others, an unexpected journalistic crisis looms in the horizon. The Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) has learned that Neil Sheehan, The New York Times’ best investigative reporter known for his critical coverage of the Vietnam War, has not had a major byline in months. Bradlee’s journalistic instincts kick in, and he tells Kay that this can only mean one thing: Sheehan is on to something big, and The Washington Post needs to find out what that story is.

The story, of course, is that someone has leaked thousands of pages from McNamara’s secret history of the Vietnam War to the Times, and now the Post’s biggest rival is about to publish it in a series of articles. Naturally, Bradlee knows that if his newspaper can also get in the action, the reputations of his staff, the newspaper, and himself as editor will be burnished.

But Kay Graham is worried. Not only is she in a fight for control of her company, but she’s also a friend of Robert McNamara, who is one of her most trusted advisors. Will she be able to put her personal feelings for a friend aside and publish a story that, in McNamara’s words, is not flattering to him?

Then there’s the problem with the Nixon Administration, which is obsessed with secrecy and overly conscious of its public image. Although President Nixon was sworn in after the secret history was completed, he was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Vice President and had helped shape America’s Cold War policies between 1953 and 1961. Like his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Nixon knows the war in Vietnam is a losing proposition. And like them, he has kept this knowledge from the American public and prolonged the conflict rather than become the first American President to lose a major war.

Aided by investigative reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) and others on the Washington Post staff, Bradlee strives to persuade Kay to publish the documents known as the “Pentagon Papers.” But opposition and intimidation from Nixon and his staff, as well as calls for caution from Parsons (a fictitious character drawn from real-life members of the Washington Post Company’s board of directors) and Bob McNamara make Kay Graham hesitate.

Now the question is, which route will Kay Graham take? Does she take Bradlee’s side and publish the leaked documents? Or does she take the path of least resistance and bow to the wishes of President Nixon and others?

My Take

Historical dramas, especially political thrillers like The Post, often face the same narrative challenges that a prequel along the lines of Star Wars- Episode I: The Phantom Menace has: We know how it ends. (Or, rather, we're supposed to know how it ends.)  Many – not all, but enough – people watching the movie are at least peripherally aware that The Washington Post followed The New York Times’ lead and defied the Nixon Administration when it published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers after a 6-3 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of the two publications.

As a result, Spielberg’s film is not so much a spine-chilling suspense movie which leaves the viewer on edge. Even younger audience members who were born decades after the end of the Vietnam and Watergate eras know, or should know, how this story unfolds and its fateful outcome.

Of course, Spielberg and his vast array of onscreen and behind-the-scenes talent achieve a certain level of dramatic tension through pacing, great performances, and a riveting score by the director’s long-time creative partner, composer John Williams.

Though the film only has one action sequence at the beginning and most of the tension comes from a lot of dialogue, The Post is a fast-paced movie. For a historical piece with a “Big Message” (the First Amendment rights of the press to inform the public trumps the President’s desire for maximum secrecy) attached, it has a modest running time of 116 minutes.

Herein lies the film’s biggest weakness. Its brevity and focus on one publication makes for a good story for the masses, but it is not good history.

Obviously, a movie titled The Post is going to be biased in favor of Kay Graham, Ben Bradlee, and The Washington Post, and Spielberg is aware of this. I seriously don’t think that a man who has been at the center of American movie-making for 50 years is deliberately setting out to distort American history and making it look like Graham and Bradlee were the main journalistic heroes in the Pentagon Papers debacle.

Yet, there are many New York Times veterans who were involved in the famous clash between the press and the antagonistic Nixon Administration who were not happy with the screenplay’s focus on Graham. Bradlee, and the Post staff at the expense of their own publication.

To history buffs and purists, this argument makes sense.  The Times was the first publication to get the copies of the secret McNamara study from Daniel Ellsberg, and it was Neil Sheehan who wrote the articles that enraged Richard Nixon.

Yet, Spielberg, Hannah, and Singer chose to avoid going the obvious route and telling a male-dominated story in which Neil Sheehan – who is never seen or heard onscreen – is the protagonist and leads a mostly-male cast in a film titled The Pentagon Papers.

Sure, such a story would have been relevant and riveting, and maybe it could have featured Tom Hanks as a dogged New York Times reporter or editor.

Then again, we would have been denied the first-ever onscreen collaboration between Meryl Streep (who earned an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination here), Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. Streep and Hanks play off each other well as Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee, and Spielberg gets great performances not only from his two leads but from a large ensemble cast.

At a time when the U.S. journalistic profession is under attack by a petulant, abrasive President who labels any coverage that doesn’t flatter him as “fake news” and millions of Americans doubt the credibility of “mainstream media,” The Post is still a powerful reminder that a free society is an informed one.

Or, as the Washington Post’s Trump era motto puts it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”