Skip to main content
opinion

Donald Trump swept into the White House last year pledging to radically change America. He's already changed the meaning of many of its movies.

Case in point: The Post, Steven Spielberg's new political thriller about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham's historic decision in 1971 to publish stories about a classified government-commissioned chronicle of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. When producer Amy Pascal bought the script in October, 2016, she envisioned the film as a celebration of a female pioneer – Graham was also the first female chief executive of a Fortune 500 company – which she expected would have special resonance in an America that was about to elect its first female president.

So much for that.

By the time The Post went before the cameras last spring, against a backdrop of Trump using his bully pulpit to bully the media, the film was seen as a thumb in the eye to his administration, a First Amendment parable about the importance of journalists publishing what they see fit and their constitutionally guaranteed right to defy the liars in power. And it gives succour to whistle-blowers who might aspire to be latter-day versions of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst-turned-radical who smuggled the Pentagon Papers out of his office at the RAND Corporation and leaked them to The New York Times and the Post, to the outrage of the Nixon Administration.

As Trump escalates his campaign against the media and leakers, with his Fake News Awards and talk of overhauling the libel laws, especially during the film industry's awards season, The Post provides a timely rallying cry to those who fear the dictatorial inclinations of the current U.S. President.

Hollywood has a soft spot for movies about journalism – which, like the town itself, is fuelled by storytellers and filled with people whose personal lives bleed into their work. (Literally. The marketing tagline for Broadcast News was, "It's the story of their lives.") Many of those behind the scenes in film and TV began as ink-stained wretches – and not just those, such as Charles MacArthur (His Girl Friday, The Front Page), who wound up writing movies about newsrooms. Pascal herself is married to an ex-journalist, former New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub.

The Post follows in the golden footsteps of perhaps the most revered film about the trade, All the President's Men, which takes place less than a year after the Times and the Post published the Pentagon Papers. Both films are suitably earnest, but the new one has an even more romantic view of its subject. Tom Hanks plays the Post's executive editor Ben Bradlee as – well, as Tom Hanks. All of the crusts with which Jason Robards had pockmarked his Bradlee in President's Men have been cut off.

It feels almost as if Spielberg fears that any sharp criticism of journalism would only give fuel to its enemies. So, sure, at one point, Bradlee instructs an intern to take the train up to New York to spy on the competition and find out what the Times's star investigative reporter, Neal Sheehan, is working on, and when the intern asks, "Is that legal?", Bradlee rolls up his sleeves and growls, "What is it you think we do here for a living, kid?" But the moment is played for conspiratorial laughs rather than cynicism, and is designed to co-opt the audience: We're all in this together, it says, and hold on, because, damn, it's going to be fun.

The film was written by Liz Hannah, a first-time screenwriter, and Josh Singer, who has made a mini-career out of writing movies based on true stories that celebrate whistle-blowers and reporters: Singer's first was The Fifth Estate, the Julian Assange thriller that audiences snubbed on its release in 2013, perhaps because its ethics were murky (and the real-life Assange attacked it as "a reactionary snoozefest"). Singer followed that up with Spotlight, a rousing crowd-pleaser about a small team of investigative reporters at The Boston Globe whose only ethical murkiness lay in the question of how quickly they should push unwilling sources to hand over information about the Catholic Church's abuse cover-up. He snagged an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay, and the film won for best picture.

But even though producer Blye Faust paid tribute to journalists as she accepted the Oscar statuette – saying in her speech onstage, "we would not be here today without the heroic efforts of [the Boston Globe] reporters" – it's clear that Hollywood as a whole likes movies about journalists a lot more than it does the mucky reality of journalism itself.

The studios and the institutions that support them, from talent agencies to publicity outfits, are notoriously controlling, freezing out reporters and critics deemed unfriendly for simply asking tough questions. Indeed, as the allegations about Harvey Weinstein spilled out during the fall, numerous outlets noted how they, too, had tried to break the story over the years and been threatened or cajoled into backing down.

Even Amy Pascal herself gets prickly when journalists come too close. Three years ago, when she was head of Sony Pictures, hackers leaked her e-mails, including embarrassing exchanges with other producers, carping about certain high-profile actors. Reporters gobbled up the fruits of the hack, tasting blood and schadenfreude, and her correspondence rocketed around the internet.

A few months later, when asked about the incident, she sounded resentful, if not quite Nixonian. "People found reasons that going through my trash and printing it was an okay thing to do," she told Tina Brown during an on-stage chat at a conference. "They found a way to justify that. And they have to live with that."

Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg discuss the impact and continuing relevance of new movie, The Post.

Reuters

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe