The Post: Steven Spielberg's hammy ode to journalism is a hack job

Spielberg is expert at peddling sanctimonious pap, which is being eagerly lapped up, making it the third most successful movie at box office

The Post might not be a good movie but it’s definitely not a bad one. What wears me out is the futility of making something that is nothing more than Oscar bait at a time when the US President dismisses non-Fox media as “fake news”.

Director Steven Spielberg puts the audience through the motions about a military analyst leaking classified reports documenting the pitfalls of the Vietnam War during the Truman administration. Under Nixon’s time, these papers almost made it to the New York Times but an injunction from the US government stopped a potential embarrassment.

But when Tom Hanks gets a whiff of this, in his role as Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor of Washington Post, the entire Nixon administration tries its best to upend any kind of reporting on the subject. Bradlee has the unstinted support of the paper’s owner, Katharine Graham (an extremely fidgety Meryl Streep), even though the potential fallout is straight-up sabotage of the company that is going public around the same time.

The movie ambles along and at constant intervals we are given regular spiels about freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But all this only makes us yearn for something that the current world can’t offer anymore, what with listicles and job cuts being the order of the day. That’s why journalists reviewing The Post must be feeling a little like a German Shepherd being asked to be objective about a beef steak thrown at him.

My despair only increased when I watched the riveting HBO documentary called The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee. The viewer gets the world view of the man who was at the helm of affairs at the time of Watergate. His stint as Newsweek’s Paris correspondent took him a long way from his Catholic roots in Boston.

A still from The Post

He became great friends with John F Kennedy and really saw post-Second World War America prospering. We don’t get to see his brash attitude in Tom Hanks, who seemingly never tires of displaying his Mr Nice Guy credentials. Movie actors pull off a lot of characters effortlessly but always fall short when it comes to being a journalist. The profession looks so holier than thou for outsiders, and the actors, in their starched khakis, try to be cleaner than the Pope with their smarmy earnestness.

Spielberg is expert at peddling sanctimonious pap, which is being eagerly lapped up, making it the third most successful movie at the box office among the ten Best Picture nominees for next month’s Oscars. John Maggio’s masterful documentary, a lovely mix of talking heads from Bob Woodward to Henry Kissinger and bits of Bradlee speaking from his autobiography, shows us that Bradlee had many dimensions to him. That’s why Tom Hanks is such a miscast. Bradlee was a brash chain-smoker who would always back his reporters even if their sources were sometimes sketchy.

Act first and then think was his motto and that served him well most of the time, but he wasn’t infallible. In 1981, Janet Cooke, won the Pulitzer for Washington Post for a story that was later discovered to be completely cooked up. Spielberg somehow glosses over all these character arcs. Cinema is a limiting medium and visuals are inherently reductive and the challenge for a film-maker is to make each frame count. But Spielberg is just too busy making a feel-good movie.

That said, The Post does have a few moments of levity, which cut too close to my day-to-day working life. Sample this: When Tom Hanks sends an intern to suss out what scoop New York Times is dishing out, he tells him to claim the subway ticket money from the accounts department. It was a brilliant scene when the page one copy editor, who is given under 30 minutes to edit what is possibly the biggest news story of the decade, scratches out the first sentence like a pro.

Spielberg does give Meryl Streep a truly wonderful line that epitomises the #MeToo movement: “A woman preaching is like a dog trying to walk on hind legs.” Too bad these moments are too few and far between this distended, preachy mess.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in