Bea says: We managed to get to this much-hyped, latest Spielberg outing on its day of release in the UK, at the wonderful Glasgow Film Theatre, along with a nearly full house on a sleety Friday afternoon.
Well, it is a good story, strongly-written with good pace
and two excellent actors holding the fort effortlessly (Streep and Hanks). It’s nicely shot, and there are some great
scenes of how newspapers used to be – hard copy papers, typewriters, printing presses,
the papers manually bundled together, thrown into trucks, driven to delivery
points. Just that made me realise how
different things are in the world of work today.
Of course, much is made of Graham’s gender
and her invisibility in the otherwise all-male boardroom, and after the Supreme
Court win. I was more interested in her
personal story of entering the workforce after her husband’s suicide; and Cecil
and I discussed later – we would both have been loth to take the risk of
going to print; was it the fact that she hadn’t worked until she was 45, and so
was more naïve of potential work problems that helped her take that risk, or
was it really that she was a born editor?
I also think that this is the more interesting of the gender issues
presented in the film; that middle and upper class women did not routinely work
at this time (not very long ago) and so if a time came when they had to, it was
difficult and traumatic. The film does
not really look that much either at how things were changing for younger women
entering the workforce, or the experience of working class or poorer women, who
did have to work. There was also an
audible groan in the audience at the dinner party when the women retired to the
lounge room and the men stayed around the table discussing politics…But in
reality this aspect of the film felt a bit tacked on, as a response to the
womens’ marches and #metoo campaign over the past year.
Perhaps I’m just being cynical, but there was
only one really key female character in the film, and lots of men….it's still
“his”tory I’m afraid.
The film’s other and more central theme was that of freedom
of the press, and is impossible to miss, perhaps if anything (although I agree
with it) a bit heavy handed….there are quite a few speeches to camera about it,
thinly veiled in the plot.
But, it is in its own way a must-see, and a comment on our
times which only a bit more than a year ago I could not really have
foreseen. Spielberg’s technique is
excellent, my only comment would be to deliver the message with a lighter
touch.
Watch out for the young hippy girl delivering the package to
the Washington Post – Spielberg’s
daughter who is an actor in her own right.
***1/2
Cecil says: I liked The Post for the way it took me back to days when newspaper really did go to press. I remember the smell and the din of the printing presses turning on the Hull Daily Mail as a child; Murdoch and The Times dispute of the 1980s largely did for all the old type-setting and printing work done before I got into media myself.
But I was struck by the scene where the journalists' copy arrives on the desk of the sub-editors, and he immediately strikes out most of the first sentence, replacing it with just a word or two. It reminded me how vital the role of sub-editors used to be, and just how many mistakes, repetitions and poorly constructed sentences get through to print these days since that stage of the production process is now done (or not done, in fact) by journalists themselves.
I actually didn't know about the Pentagon Papers story so that was interesting, though the whole way it was portrayed made you know that Watergate was just around the corner, with Nixon shouting orders down the phone about suppressing press freedoms, covert phone calls to sensitive sources (the famous 'Deep Throat' in Watergate) and the fact that the Washington Post was in the game of such revelations over that period.
I was in the Post offices in 2010, and the offices themselves looked much as they were shown to be in the 1960s-70s of this film. It was also nice to see the Jefferson Hotel, where we had one of our final drinks before leaving Washington.
But the film only gets three stars from me for reasons Bea has already alluded to. Spielberg was being almost as full-on about his 'message' as directors like Ken Loach or Michael Moore can be. I didn't need the First Amendment rammed down my throat or the really obvious references to gender equality, but clearly Donald Trump does need that, as do the voters who supported the current President, and probably sadly some of them DO need the message ramming down their throat, as both Trump and many of his supporters seem to have changed little in the 365 days since he took office.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep were wonderful, though. Great to watch them on the screen together.
***
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