Movie Review: The Post

The war goes on

By Jonathan Price

Perhaps it’s just my imagination or prejudices, but it seems to me an inordinate number of recent feature films – supposedly a form of film fiction, and hopefully art forms in themselves – are either infinite sequels of mildly successful previous films, or retellings of actual events (history or news in some sense). What’s missing, more frequently than before, are fiction films that create characters that probe deeply into what’s behind history or human character or behavior. I suppose to some extent, this is a false dichotomy, and there have been very good films made from actual historical events: I could mention, e.g., Patton. But when I go through my deep mental catalog of great intriguing films, they are nearly all fiction films, even if their origins are murky or dubious or quasi-historical: The Rules of the Game, Shoot the Piano Player, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. This is a brief list, but for me it seems representative.
    Having launched this mild resistance to the glut of films about historical events or figures, I willingly admit that the film of that genre under consideration here – The Post – is a film of serious artistic merit, but to me it also seems to lack some far deeper dimension, because, whatever it is, it is essentially a retelling of actual and momentous historical events. So, for example, are Dunkirk, The Darkest Hour, and I Tonya, though the last is not about momentous historical events; intriguingly the first two overlap in their focus on the same quintessential and brief historical period, the spring of 1940.

The Post, like so many films, is misleadingly and ambiguously titled, since it is hardly about the entire or even the summary history or experience of The Washington Post. It doesn’t even begin with the historic Post but with warfare in the jungles of Vietnam and the experience of Daniel Ellsberg and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The real focus is on the publication of the Pentagon Papers, supposedly revealing all the government secrets and judgments and misjudgments about the war from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson, and the roles of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post, and Ben Bradlee, its editor – and of Ellsberg – in their publication.

    Since it is a newspaper story, or a story about how the personnel at a newspaper go about finding and vetting information, there is a lot of moving of actors in and about crowded city rooms, with desks and doors and obstruction. So the early “action” in Vietnam is replaced by movement in offices, in homes, and across city streets (mainly young men running across the street, defying traffic) to the New York Times building in New York (the Times had been the first to work intensely on the story of the Pentagon Papers and to begin publication before it was temporarily enjoined by a court injunction). Katherine Graham and her editor are in conflict about whether to take the legal and financial and personal risk to begin publication of the Papers against a President’s wishes and a court order. Graham is repeatedly shown in rooms full of men, where she is – apparently – the first woman with her kind of power; and it is clear from her hesitations and nervousness that she is not always confident in her role.

    When the Post gets the story – via a copy of the Papers given to a newspaper friend by Ellsberg himself and then transported via its own first class seat on a plane to Washington – it is confronted with the legal injunction, and a series of meetings about the legal consequences of publishing ensue as the principals of the story move among the offices of the Post and the homes of Bradlee and Graham.
    More powerfully, we see the words of the story being set into large and heavy type (much more dramatic, of course, than a current word processor and electronic transmission and printing). As in so many films about the press, e.g., Absence of Malice, the great scenes are of the long multistory columns of newsprint moving many stories up and down the interior of the Post plant once Bradlee tells his printer it’s a “go.” This is the visual equivalent of the power of the press, whose intellectual force is presumably what Nixon had wished to foreclose. The principals at the Post go ahead with their actions without certainly, but the philosophical climax to the film comes as we see and hear on TV a newsroom reporter read aloud to others the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in favor of publication.

Daniel Ellsberg

Despite this sense of intellectual and political triumph and moral justification in the climactic scene, the publication of stories about the Papers in 1971 did not end U.S. involvement in Vietnam; the American government continued to support the South Vietnamese government and had some troops there into 1973; the last Americans did not leave until being forced out in 1975, when the government of North Vietnam successfully invaded the South and overran Saigon, thus winning the war and causing all Americans to leave. In other words, the publication of the Papers, while justifiable, did not directly lead to the end of the war, as Daniel Ellsberg had hoped.
    The “truth” of historical events is far messier than movies; in fact, the opening scenes of The Post, set in a Vietnam battle in the early sixties, would lead a third-party observer, I suspect, to no clear conclusion, as a young(er) Ellsberg merely grabs a helmet and goes on a sortie where American forces are ambushed and suffer casualties: that’s it. The scenes lack clarity and force; then again, the American government’s positions and military strategies could be said, over 20 years, to have suffered from the same confusion. It’s a lot easier to focus on a few idealistic reporters and editors and a Supreme Court victory for the First Amendment. A coda scene at the end takes us to the Watergate building and a security guard discovering tape on the locks and an observer noting the inept burglars at the Washington headquarters of the Democratic Party during the key election of 1972.
    A knowledgeable viewer is expected to tie this final scene to the entire Watergate scandal, the Post’s revelation of it, the key roles of Woodward and Bernstein, and the near-impeachment, then resignation of President Nixon. This was a signal victory for the paper, already highlighted in a memorable film, All the President’s Men, with its similar scenes of reporters running dramatically through newsrooms. But again the war went on.

Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Price