Steven Spielberg brings his massive prestige to bear on the issue of fake news and real values in journalism and politics with this handsome, heartfelt picture about the Washington Post and its battle to publish the Pentagon papers in 1971.
It’s a movie that draws on a spirit of Capraesque romantic decency, combined with the toughness and resolution on display in Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men: a world of chain-smoking, shirtsleeved newsmen who were given weeks and months to work on an important story. Tom Hanks plays the paper’s battle-hardened editor and liberal lion Ben Bradlee, and Meryl Streep plays the proprietor and Georgetown social queen Kay Graham, a woman at first daunted by the responsibility of running a newspaper she effectively inherited from her late husband, and moreover proposing to run an explosively controversial story just at the delicate moment when the Post is to be launched on the stock exchange, that home of stuffy and pusillanimous conservatism. But Streep shows how she finds in herself a steely core of leadership. She becomes a veritable Queen Elizabeth I to Bradlee’s Francis Drake, as Nixon’s armada of lawyers appear on the horizon, threatening their investigative reporters with prison.
The Post is initially shown to be furious when the New York Times gets what looks like the scoop of the decade, trumpeting the fact that it is about to publish a cache of secret government documents from a Pentagon analyst that make it clear successive US administrations knew that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. But then the Times gets injuncted. A mysterious source dumps some of these papers in the Post’s lap, and its veteran reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) tracks down their source: the former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys, paranoically holed up in a hotel room, with the entire archive stacked up around him on the beds and the carpet.
Ellsberg hands them over and now the race is on to sift through this gigantic mound of paper, fillet it for salient facts and prepare to publish before the government gets wind of what is happening and extends the legal ban to the Post. And all the time, the boardroom faint-hearts and suit-wearing apparatchiks are terrified, and would rather Bradlee would just run sweet stories about the wedding of Nixon’s daughter.
The sheer muscular confidence of this movie is what is so exhilarating, that feeling – surely familiar to anyone watching a Spielberg film – of being in safe hands and being treated to a masterclass in storytelling. The clarity and simplicity of this movie’s address to its audience is a marvel and Spielberg makes it look easy. Arguably, there are flaws. The performances of both Streep and Hanks, though terrifically charming and watchable, are not precisely a stretch, and not wholly unlike personae that they have created before: templates of folksiness and queenliness respectively. The former defense secretary and pro-Vietnam strategist Bob McNamara, played here by Bruce Greenwood, is incidentally treated leniently – a legacy effect, I suspect, of the real McNamara’s genially seductive one-man turn in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary The Fog of War.
But this film lands a powerful punch. It is rousing and thrilling and its obvious connections with the present day are all the more potent for never having to be spelled out.
