‘Comfortable efficiency porn’: Why The Post is my feel-good movie | mail

Steven Spielberg was never an extremist. While Francis Ford Coppola directed Apocalypse Now and even George Lucas attacked the Vietnam War with Star Wars, Hollywood’s uptight new star was more interested in the games of filmmaking than politics. In Peter Biskind’s best-selling book of Tinseltown gossip, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, actor Kit Carson recalls meeting Spielberg at a party when the turmoil of the 1968 presidential campaign was raging. “Everyone was awake,” Carson recalls. “The revolution was about to happen.” All the young director wanted to talk about was how to take the picture while throwing the camera off the roof.

Ultimately, it took him 40 years to produce his own criticism against the American foreign policy of his youth. In uncharacteristic political style, he spent most of his time drawing parallels with the current resident of the White House at the time.

The Post is competent porn who is comfortable in front of and behind the camera. Spielberg read Liz Hannah’s spec script in February 2017 after another project collapsed. By December, the film had been released in cinemas, and although its subject was nominally the Washington Post’s handling of the Pentagon Papers, its essence was one of the last rants from reporters and the press on the big screen. Is it a boring choice for a movie where the journalist is happy? Maybe: It’s like a dog explaining the merits of a pat on the head.

But while it’s often been compared to the investigative journalist’s cult favorite, All the President’s Men (not unfairly, considering that the final scene leads up, like the MCU, to the events of Alan J Pakula’s 1976 classic), The Post is actually a very different beast from most of its genre companions. Her story is not a slow burn in pursuit of truth and justice, but instead a rapid burn of shoe leather as the intern runs through Manhattan to deliver the latest scoop to The New York Times. Spielberg himself described it as a “chase movie with reporters.” It sure flows like one.

This breaking news story is told at a breakneck pace – with good people making tough decisions while everyone is screaming at them to hurry the hell up. It’s journalism like public service and adrenaline, made all the more urgent by John Williams’ brilliantly propulsive score; Like everything in the film, it was written quickly. The pace of production was so fast that Spielberg entered the recording sessions for the score “without having heard any note” beforehand.

Then an island of calm between the cliffs. Meryl Streep is effortlessly confident as the not-so-confident Katharine Graham. It’s a movie star performance in a role that turns the character’s insecurities into her greatest weapon: her triumphant insult to boardroom idiot Bradley Whitford (“I’m talking to Mr. Bradley now”) is an injection of endorphins straight to the brain. For all his noble reverence for the First Amendment, Spielberg doesn’t forget to fill The Post with moments like this; He’s making a movie, dammit, and he’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like a movie.

The old Hollywood feel extends to the rest of the cast as well, which consists of fewer movie stars (except for Tom Hanks) and more of a carefully selected gang of actors. Under-the-radar draft picks like Jesse Plemons and Matthew Rhys have been proven hundreds of times in the years since. It even features a mysterious villain, the sinister silhouette of Richard Nixon voiced using archival tapes of the man himself.

Like any good fantasy novel, the story (ironically) takes some liberties with the truth. Staff at The New York Times were ‘furious’ at their newspaper’s role being downplayed in one of its biggest scoops ever. “I was so angry,” one said. “[a] “Stupid project,” shouted another.

But the Washington Post’s selective stance toward the truth is less important than it should be. Written more as a personal study of Graham than a history of the Pentagon Papers, producer Amy Pascal originally picked up the story of women’s leadership against the odds in 2016 to coincide with Hillary Clinton’s impending election victory. The result, whether religiously realistic or not, reflected a different national mood than was intended.

The film’s optimistic outlook towards the journalism industry seemed to die shortly after its release. Five years later, Deadline declared that “journalists are not as interesting as they think” when dissecting the #MeToo investigation into its box office woes. Spielberg was probably right that this story needed to be told as quickly as possible; Would today’s public so easily believe that journalists are the good guys?

So, I’m nostalgic for 2017, of all years: when movies were movies and appropriate for adults, when Steven Spielberg could pull off a $50 million drama on a whim, when “truth” and “the American way” could appear together outside the punchline.

A group of world-class talent working at breakneck speed to tell a story where time is of the essence. Could there be a better tribute to the journalistic ideal than that?