Hollywood has, as a rule, never been on first-name terms with history, which it has primarily viewed as a source of intriguing stories and inspiration for pretty pictures, with historical authenticity in Hollywood films usually ending up as the lowest priority. It is thus a tragic irony that Hollywood has largely shaped history itself—that the general perception of numerous, often profoundly significant historical events is grounded in Hollywood films that have elevated myth above historical truth. Given such prolific historical myth-making in Hollywood, one might have anticipated the time when Hollywood itself would begin to believe its own myths. A prime example of this is The Post, Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film, which nominally draws on real events from less than half a century earlier but in reality perpetuates a myth now cherished by today’s Hollywood hipsters not so much for propaganda as for therapeutic reasons.
The narrative begins in 1965, when young military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) accompanies American soldiers on a patrol in the jungles of South Vietnam. Having witnessed one of many instances where young American conscripts end up in plastic body bags, Ellsberg becomes convinced that the United States is stuck in the Vietnam War and cannot win it. To his great surprise, his superior, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), shares this view but dares not admit it publicly, instead continuing to trumpet the official line about an imminent victory. Six years later, with President Nixon continuing the war from the White House, Ellsberg decides to expose official policy by publishing a series of explosive documents on the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. All this, however, is of little concern to Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), the widow of the Washington Post’s tragically deceased publisher, who is contemplating taking the newspaper public. Her editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), catches wind that the rival and far more prestigious New York Times might be about to publish sensational war-related news. His investigation leads him to Ellsberg, but this creates a dilemma for Graham, as publishing the Pentagon Papers could bring down the wrath of the vindictive Nixon upon the then relatively undistinguished and less powerful Washington Post, along with lawsuits, injunctions, and other complications that might reduce the newspaper to penury.
It is not difficult to argue that The Post owes its existence primarily to Donald Trump’s election as the 45th American president. Although the screenplay was written before the 2016 election, the entire project was launched at the beginning of 2017, with Spielberg jumping into it with little preparation, later justifying this by claiming the theme—concerning media freedom and the limits of power in modern democracies—had become “timely.” In reality, the timeliness lies less in the deep mutual antipathy between Trump and the American mainstream media, which had its historical parallels in the Nixon era, than in the impeachment narrative, through which Hollywood’s salon leftists—including Spielberg himself—sought some solace or at least hope that the unbearable reality of living in a world where Hillary Clinton is not president would soon end. It was to be expected that the impeachment story, an institution of presidential removal that has had practical effects only once, in Nixon’s case, would find its cinematic reflection in a film about the Watergate scandal. Such a film, however, had already been made in 1976 in the form of the classic All the President’s Men, a remake of which even Spielberg did not dare attempt. Instead of the heroic tale of Woodward and Bernstein, a hagiographic story was crafted about the institution they worked for—the Washington Post, which in late 2010s and early 2020s, whether by accident or design, enjoyed the status of the unofficial mouthpiece of the anti-Trump resistance movement in Washington.
The story of the Pentagon Papers is now regarded as a sort of prelude or introduction to the Watergate scandal, though, upon reflection, it had far more significant consequences and was inherently more important than the fate of a single presidential administration. The decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, and even more so the Supreme Court ruling that prevented the U.S. federal government from attempting to halt their publication, was of exceptional importance in establishing new standards of free speech and press freedom in a country that likes to portray itself as a model for all modern democracies. Spielberg’s The Post depicts these events but does so from a perspective that casts the owner and editor-in-chief of the Post—an institution that was merely a secondary player in the Pentagon Papers story—as protagonists. The script, not entirely convincingly, attempts to elevate the importance of the Washington Post, or at the very least downplay the far more arduous work and significant role played by the New York Times. Spielberg and other Hollywood leftists were aided by the fact that Graham was a woman, allowing them to use her struggle to assert herself among her male colleagues, bankers, and associates, who still harboured sexist prejudices against her as a motivating factor. On the other hand, the script fails to integrate this effectively. As a result, the film feels like three movies clumsily stitched together—the story of Ellsberg’s exposure of the dark side of the Vietnam War, Katharine Graham’s battle against sexism, and journalists’ efforts to secure new standards of press freedom. Spielberg has directed all this competently and has at his disposal an exceptionally diverse and willing cast. Nevertheless, The Post still comes across as disjointed and overly opportunistic. Most striking, however, is its smugness—that is, its settling of scores with decades-old Nixon and Vietnam-era grievances. Hollywood and Spielberg would not dare make a film about today’s equivalents of the Post and the Pentagon Papers, especially considering that figures like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden receive not praise for exposing the dark sides of American imperial wars in the Post’s pages but editorials accusing them of endangering national security and calling for US government to drone-strike them in the back of the head. It can be assumed that The Post, born in a brief historical moment, will quickly fade into obscurity—and that its creators won’t particularly mind.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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