Steven Spielberg’s handsome new picture has a big, beating heart on its classically tailored sleeve. It’s a rousingly watchable film from first-time screenwriter Liz Hannah about the Washington Post, its editor Ben Bradlee, proprietor Kay Graham and what is supposedly their platonic office romance while publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In the face of legal threats and boardroom fainthearts, their mission was to disclose the truth about how the US government deceived America about the unwinnability of the Vietnam war. It was the scoop that paved the way for the Watergate investigation.
The film is a pointed celebration of liberal decency in the past and implied present. Its stars’ unadorned surnames have been put up on the poster over the title with granite simplicity: “Streep Hanks The Post”. These are naturally intended as Lincoln-Memorial-level rebukes to today’s various squalid declines in Washington and Hollywood.
Q&AWhat were the Pentagon Papers, and why were they so important?
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In 1971 the Pentagon-based analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times volumes of material disclosing how the US government had lied about the Vietnam war.
The leak helped change the public perception of the war, leading to the start of America's withdrawal of troops. But the consequences went further, delivering victories both for press freedom and whistleblowers.
A former marine who began working for the government in 1964, Ellsberg was shocked when he came across internal documents that were later to become known as 'Pentagon Papers'. They showed that US administrations had known from the outset that the war was unwinnable, yet kept on sending troops.
The NY Times, using photocopies of the Pentagon Papers given to them Ellsberg, began running a series of stories. When the Nixon administration successfully sought an injunction to prevent further publication, the Washington Post stepped in, defying the law by printing more stories.
The supreme court eventually ruled in favour of the newspapers' right to publish, a landmark decision for the American media. Ellsberg’s own case was a landmark for whistleblowing. Charged under the Espionage Act and facing 115 years in jail, his case was dismissed in 1973 after it emerged the Nixon administration had been engaged in dirty tricks aimed to undermine him.
At the age of 86, he is still fighting for government transparency and championing whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden. Writing in the Post in 2013, Ellsberg said: “One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.”
We get a series of stunning madeleines from 1971. Smoking in the workplace. Smoking and drinking over leisured lunches in panelled dining rooms, which get interrupted by people bringing urgent notes. Dialler phones. Payphones. Hot metal type. Newsroom shirtsleeves and ties mostly done up. An American president who is evil but not stupid. People who publish leaked documents without winding up barricaded in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. People who publish leaked documents without winding up endorsing a president who is evil and stupid. And to add to this gorgeous period detail, Spielberg reproduces some of the characteristic middle-distance sound design and overlapping dialogue of his film work from the 70s.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep give excellent performances, though not exactly a stretch in either case, and both with a tiny, tasty touch of cheese. Their characterisations are luxuriously upholstered, effortlessly fluent, busting with relatability.
Streep’s Graham is the Washington social queen who inherited the business from her late husband, and is daunted by the process of taking the paper public on the stock exchange at this moment of crisis, nettled at the condescension she faces from the menfolk. It is a portrait that has some of her society warbler Florence Foster Jenkins with a touch of her gimlet-eyed magazine editor Miranda Priestly, from The Devil Wears Prada.
Hanks brings out his inner Jimmy Stewart as editor Bradlee, veteran newspaperman and former Kennedy consigliere. He can be cantankerous and short-tempered though never anything but sympathetic, and we get to see his home life. He is certainly a long way from Jason Robards’ more obstreperous, unfolksy portrayal of Bradlee in All the President’s Men, in which he famously growls that he would not reproduce Nixon’s bad language because the Post was “a family newspaper”.
The third character – The Post itself – reaches its moment of destiny when it is gallingly beaten to a great story as the New York Times announces it has documentary proof of government mendacity on Vietnam. But an injunction stops the Times from publishing; an anonymous source (here, a mysterious young woman) dumps some of these papers in the Washington Post’s lap. Reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) tracks down their source: the former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys. He hands over this colossal archive in its entirety and the race is on to publish before the attorney general’s office can contrive to extend the legal ban any further. But the Post’s stuffy and pusillanimous board are worried that they’ll all go to prison. Graham has to show some steel.
It’s a great moment when the dithering, flustering, panicking Graham finally gives the go-ahead: “Yes … yes … um … Big decision … Let’s publish, let’s publish!” It’s the sort of chaotic, absurd moment on which history really does turn. And I loved the scene when Bagdikian is having to talk to Ellsberg on a payphone outside near a noisy off-ramp, dropping his quarters all over the sidewalk.
But how about Ellsberg? In the aftermath, we get a rather accelerated account of Bradlee and Graham euphorically fighting their case up to the supreme court, outside which a stream of idealistic young women gaze respectfully at Graham, conferring on her a feminist status that may not have been apparent at the time. Yet the story of Ellsberg, who faced a prison sentence of 115 years, then overturned, is rather forgotten about. This is a flaw in the film. For all that, it’s a stirring drama of principle. In its way, a call to arms.
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