With some inaccuracies that can't be ignored, its still a compelling version of history
The amount of institutionalised shutting up and silencing that probably goes down on a governmental level is difficult to comprehend. Politicians and governors, whatever species they come from, are very likely to be hacks and liars. This prevailing image didn’t just appear overnight, a long-running circus of lies and treachery, offices being held by greedy baboons in dark blue pin-striped suits and polished black shoes has cemented the double take one has to do when they come across a politician. Are they to be trusted, can a single word coming out of their mouth be taken seriously? These people will go leaps and bounds to ensure that any voices speaking out against them are snuffed out, even if it’s the same voices which put them where they are now, just so they can stay in office. Because a politician out of office is a repugnant sight, you’ll find them roaming the streets with their suits creased and in tatters, wearing haggard, emaciated expressions on their saturnine faces which resemble the countenance of a person falling out an airplane without a parachute who has accepted their grim fate and is just waiting for the ground to turn them into pulp. You’ll probably catch them in dark and remote alleys, peddling their asses to layers and cops with secret vices and turning tricks with the hustlers down at the dockyards.
Jesus rambling Christ! Where have we gone? This was intended to be an honest and fruitful review about The Post (2017), coming straight out of the fingers of a “journalist” who’s a walking embarrassment to the vocation. I suppose looking back at it, it certainly does read that way. That entire first paragraph was supposed to be reserved for a depressing monologue of what our world would turn into if the freedom of speech and press was supressed, how dire and dystopian things would turn out to be. The first thought which popped in my head was how we’re already heading down that dystopian road if politicians and government parties can just block people and organisations from saying certain things that sway public opinion, and I could suddenly feel the disgust rising in me and it turned into a vindictive death-howl against these lunatics.
As it stands this review has turned unsalvageable so I might as well just see what direction it takes me in. On another one of those increasingly elusive days off from work, I watched The Post. I had worked up quite the desire to watch it after reading Hunter S. Thompson’s coverage of the Watergate break-in. Seeing as The Washington Post were the first to break the story, I thought it’d be quite fitting to watch what is effectively a pre-cursor to that historically repugnant nail in the coffin for our old buddy Nixon.
Allow me to give you a brief run-down of the plot here. Top-secret, classified papers are leaked which confirm US involvement in Vietnam and Indochina going back twenty years and four presidents, all when they showed their carnal faces on national TV and denied any involvement or desire to wage war with Vietnam. A bullet-hell of a story indeed which gets broken by The New York Times. Meanwhile on the other side of the country, The Washington Post, also amidst a twister of financial and boardroom problems of its own, is trying to deal with the fact that they’re stumbling languidly behind The Times and have nothing worth reporting about – and what is the point in covering scraps which have already been covered before? The government recovering swiftly from this back-hand retaliate the only way they know how, sending The Times a letter of injunction to shut them up. The Post on the other hand manage to track down the source of the leak and find out the story is much bigger than what The Times originally published, now dealing with the question of whether to print the story and potentially go to jail, or let the government abuse their power and keep the tape over their mouths, ridding them of the freedom for press.
What starts off as a race to break every angle of this story first between two newspapers – one a global giant and the other a small local paper – quickly turns into a joint effort against the autocratic powers of the government in order to defend something that is bigger than all of them could ever imagine, with ramifications so unspeakably dire if it was ruined. The camerawork is loose and fast-paced to match the blistering high-speed vortex of a newsroom, especially when such a massive story is on the loose. This manic hand-held sort of camera movement zooms into close-ups, flies down lengths of the set and takes the eyes on such a jerky ride at intense velocities. And I like the contrast of how things slow down to a near-halt when the camera goes through a completely different set of doors, from the newsroom to the boardroom. All the scenes surrounding the investors and financial meetings where the newspapers publisher is trying to sell shares to the stock market, and the subsequent legal show-down between the papers and the government, are lensed with a camera which hovers with an almost invisible directorial style. At times it almost feels a bit too passive, but the history which is being told, however downplayed it is which I’ll get to later, is interesting enough with such a high-tension chord running through it that I overlooked the passivity of the camera and storytelling. Comparing the newsroom to the boardroom again, you can’t help but notice the night and day difference between the people that inhabit them. A huge room dense with cigarette smoke, the constant clacking of three dozen typewriters like a thousand bones being broken with half crazed reporters and journalists buzzing around the place with their shirts untucked and sleeves rolled all the way up. Then there’s the pristine wood-panelled boardroom with a gigantic oak desk in the middle, bordered by men who look facsimiles of one another; navy blue suit, black shoes, thinning hair and the occasional horn-rimmed glasses.
Both Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks give fantastic performances, although for a long-awaited collaboration between the two with Spielberg, I expected it to be something inexplicably different. I can’t seem to explain what I’m getting at here and if I tried to, I’m afraid we’ll be offering ourselves up like a virgin to the volcano of another tangent so let’s just leave it. I’m pleased by their roles and the way they carried their characters. Streep’s Katherine Graham, publisher of the newspaper, especially as she’s trying to grapple with financially diving newspaper in a male dominated industry, coming to terms with and owning the fact that she is the boss of the company and that she doesn’t have to live under the shadow of either her father or her husband – two men who ran the company before her. Her arc is the most interesting one to watch out of the duo. While Tom Hanks remains constantly entertaining to watch.
One also gets a pretty vivid feel for the times, through the costume and set design, not just visually of what was happening but through those looks and set pieces, the tumult of that era. Everything that went disastrously wrong, piling up into a mountain of shit which toppled down on all the parties involved.
I said earlier than the film downplays The New York Times’ involvement with the Pentagon Papers story. Anyone who has read extensively about this fiasco would know that The Times was a major player behind the coverage of this story, they were not only the first outlet to break it but they also did it in such a short space of time after it was leaked that it kept the issue suspended in the contemporary. The whole legal showdown at high noon between the government and the press, happened only because of The Times as well. Though these are events which are covered in the film, I feel like not much significance is given to them, at least not until very much later in the runtime once the impact of its preponderance has passed. It’s a film and some dramatizations are to be expected, which is to say that a slightly different rendition of history is what you’re getting here, which throws up the unmistakable question, should the story of a film of this sort be told with the utmost accuracy with attention to every – or most of the pertinent – details to ensure that the audience go away with the proper untwisted truth, or should some tweaking and tinkering around be allowed for the sake of entertainment? Where does that hazy line between storytelling and historical accuracy lie? But that is a question to be answered another time, or but another person. Despite the discourse I’m trying to stretch out here, it’s still a wonderful film to watch and it filters all the angles and confusing details that make up the original event in such a way that it becomes palatable for the average audience.
An entirely different question is whether the audience would want to understand the painful fact that such a thing actually happened.
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