BEFORE: I promise that I'm getting closer to reviewing "Avengers: Infinity War". I suppose I could have linked there today via William Hurt (just like I could have linked there last week via Samuel L. Jackson or Vin Diesel, or the week before via Gwyneth Paltrow) but I will get there, in just a few days. But in the meantime, I've circled back to Meryl Streep, who carries over from "One True Thing", so it's a great opportunity to sneak a couple more in before I take a little break between "Avengers" and "Solo".
Another Academy screener tonight (my last screener until early June), but this one's already on Amazon Prime - so I COULD have watched it for $4.99, but I didn't have to pay this way. Again, I WILL get a permanent copy of this one, as soon as it airs on premium cable.
THE PLOT: A cover-up that spanned four U.S. Presidents pushed the country's first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between the press and the government.
AFTER: You might get a sense of deja vu watching this film, even if you weren't around in 1971. I was alive, but I was busy being three years old, so I didn't pay much attention to the Pentagon Papers or anything else that was going on in the news. But here's the background, and stop me if you've heard this one before - the country had a Republican president who was very unpopular with liberals and the press. He even barred certain reporters and certain newspapers, the ones that didn't say nice things about him, from covering his events or getting the best access during press conferences. Anything? How about the fact that he inherited a costly, long-running war in Asia from the previous administration, and in fact the administration before THAT one, and couldn't find a way to end it without losing face. Vietnam, Afghanistan, it's all the same, really - so Trump's just Nixon with better suits and worse hair, right? Well, I don't know if it's as simple as all that, but let's roll with it for now.
The important thing is that we have a free press in this country, and if a President is allowed to control what the press can and can't print, then we don't have a democracy, we have a dictatorship. So when one newspaper got a hold of these documents and photocopied 7,000 pages ONE BY ONE, BY HAND in 1969, Daniel Ellsberg didn't know what to do with it all - mainly because WikiLeaks hadn't been invented yet. So they started to break all these secrets about the Vietnam War in the pre-failing New York Times. Problems arose when a federal judge determined that the release of these documents would be harmful to the United States, by making it look really bad, and the American people were already starting to feel that maybe Vietnam was a lost cause, so why confirm this - basically, a judge told the Times that they had to stop publishing these top secret documents, and they did. Enter the Washington Post, which picked up the ball and got the documents another way, which really was the same way, only they didn't KNOW that, so they began publishing the Vietnam secrets too, risking the same injunctions and legal challenges that were brought down on the NY Times.
It's a very good time in our history right now to remind ourselves that this is what newspapers are for, that they should work for the American people and not the government, and not the Hollywood hype machine. They should focus their time and efforts on the people in power, finding out what's going on behind the scenes and bringing that information to the public. It's kind of a big deal, I think there's even something in the Constitution about maintaining a free press, because sometimes that's the last line of defense preventing corruption, collusion and abuse of power. However, it was a BAD time for the Washington Post to get involved with this, because they were in the middle of taking their company public, buying some TV stations in order to turn their paper into a multimedia empire, and trying to raise some more capital to ensure that they could keep their best reporters on staff and paid well. But they risked all that in order to get the truth out.
However, as a film these sort of stories always present something of a narrative challenge. It's not a very visual approach, to show a bunch of reporters and editors having meetings, or talking on the phone, or reading and organizing stacks and stacks of mimeographed sheets. Film is a visual medium, and I just prefer not to spend my time watching other people doing things like reading and typing. They try in this film to show some secret meetings in hotel rooms, and people traveling back and forth between Washington and New York, or Washington and Boston, or throwing gala parties in their fancy homes, but all that is not really a substitute for action. At the end of the day, this will always be a very talky-talky film, and thus it violates the "Show, don't tell" rule again and again.
But hey, as always, your mileage may vary. Maybe you're a fan of Supreme Court cases, or the historic moments in journalism really float your boat - to each his own. The key takeaway here is that we have to remember these pieces of the past, or we will find ourselves repeating them over and over. At least when Pres. Bush the Lesser started the current unwinnable decades-long war in Asia, the press knew enough to call him out on his B.S. about the lack of WMD's (though I still think the Taliban could have MOVED them, something nobody brought up at the time) and all of that "Mission Accomplished" hoopla from 2003 (Umm, did he know what the word "accomplished" means?). But really, nothing has changed, because Trump's already repeated those mistakes, and similarly does not want to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because that would make him look "weak". So, really, it's same shit, different President, right?
Be SURE to watch this film all the way to the end credits, because there's a teaser for the sequel to this film, which was released back in 1976, if that makes any sense. I wonder if there was a temptation to put this little scene AFTER the credits, like they do with the Marvel movies.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "Inferno"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "Carol"), Bob Odenkirk (last heard in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Tracy Letts (last seen in "The Big Short"), Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Get Out"), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "Truth"), Matthew Rhys (last seen in "Burnt"), Alison Brie (last seen in "How to Be Single"), Carrie Coon (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), David Cross (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 3"), Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "Trumbo"), Zach Woods (last seen in "Ghostbusters"), Pat Healy, John Rue (also last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Rick Holmes, Philip Casnoff, Jessie Mueller, Stark Sands, Michael Cyril Creighton, Brent Langdon, Christopher Innvar, James Riordan, Kelly AuCoin, Cotter Smith, Jennifer Dundas, Will Denton, Deirdre Lovejoy, Austyn Johnson (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Deborah Green, Justin Swain, David Aaron Baker, Dan Bucatinsky, David Costabile, Johanna Day.
RATING: 5 out of 10 missing page numbers
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