In the twilight years of his career, director Steven Spielberg has been trying to tell different stories in different genres. The latest film "The Post" is quite an exciting story - the story of how rival newspapers tried to pip each other to the post (pun unintended) in publishing "The Pentagon Papers" (the papers which reveal damning confessions about how the American public in particular and the world at large was led to believe that the Vietnam war holocaust was fought without a cause. Playing the key roles in this episode is Meryl Streep as the legendary Katherine Graham, publisher and owner, The Washington Post and Ben Bradlee, the famous editor, The Washington Post. In approximately 115 minutes, Spielberg gives a riveting account of those episodic moments in his typical fluent but linear style of story-telling, though following the same drumbeat routine - a prologue of a war where an element of reporting takes out a chunky box of classified information by subterfuge and the narrative afterwards as to how two of America's most vibrant newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post trying to assert each other's snoopy adventures get to the finishing tape by reaching the source. And finally, the brilliant climax where a celebration of the Freedom of the Press ushers in with a dramatic Supreme Court verdict and a lot of maudlin moments for Kat Graham and Ben Bradlee.
On the whole, the movie is absorbing with all the details that Spielberg narratives reconstruct - the excitement of how newspapers worked in the times when nobody else , not even the Television was breaking news by the minute and mobiles and internet were unthinkable and the humongous pressures that newspaper editors and publishers went through during the worst Presidency years that American media has ever seen. The good part is the vividness and the emotionalities retained without too much fussing, aided by persuasive and nuanced performances by Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. Music by Speilberg's favorite composer John Williams is piercing yet non-invasive - the director and the music composer have shared so many lifetime's work between each other that they don't need to make an effort to fall in sync with each other - once again proved by the output of BGM in the film. The ending is a bit dramatic and formulaic with self-congratulatory glances exchanged by the two protagonists- Streep and Hanks as if they have done iconic expose. All they did was to publish papers and re-interpret history of several presidencies before and during Nixon's tenure as to the true motives of the Vietnam's war. Spielberg's strengths have been in story-telling but his weaknesses are in ignoring the larger pictures that emerged later on giving some post-script insights.
For instance, more than 3.5 million people were killed in the Vietnam war and over 58,000 American soldiers died during the war leading to devastating economic consequences. No cursory mention of the same is made except just dramatizing the efforts to reach custody of the secret papers. Do those who followed the war know that those war years are what changed the economic landscape of the world forever- Nixon was forced to abandon the Gold Standard as the dollar took a beating and hyperinflation rose? There were two books written by the protagonists - "Katherine Graham: A Personal History" and "Yours in Truth: A personal portrait of Ben Bradlee" which give exquisite insights into the effects of the War and the fallout on the American economy as well as on the Foreign policy (of which nothing has changed). This being a limited excursion into the adventurist spirit of a noted American publisher, Spielberg can be excused lapses of interpreting the larger unintended consequences of historical blunders but in my view, it is a golden opportunity missed by the director in enhancing the reportage value of the narrative. Was "Platoon" a better film than this on the Vietnam War? Unfair because the anecdotes depicted are totally different but just a food for thought whether Spielberg has the objectivity of an Oliver Sone in re-imagining political potboilers. What we can take home from the film is the general depreciation in values of Press Freedom and an unhealthy uptrend in generating "fake news" and whataboutery. Two golden lines from the film will resonate with everybody who values press as the fourth estate to keep an eternal vigil on democracy: "The principal duty of the press is to safeguard the interests of the governed, not the governors". And "The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish it." A good film to watch if you care about some of these lofty ideals which are becoming rarer than rare-earth metals. Spielberg could have also used a narrative to mention the episodes which later led Warren Buffett to bite into the shareholding of The Post and later, much later, how Jeff Bezos took hold of the venerable newspaper just as it was about to fold up.
My rating: 3/5
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