The Post

Spielberg opens with a Vietnam war scene, automatic rifles blazing to a CCR soundtrack. That not only sets the period but reminds us this is a war film. Publishing the Pentagon Papers was a wartime act — to stop America’s unnecessary wasting of lives in Vietnam. 

More to the point, we are still in that war — resisting a Republican president bent upon suppressing the free press and stifling his critics, especially those who expose his lies. Of course the Nam lies told by the governments of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon pale beside Trump’s 2,000 lies exposed in just his first year in office. The beat goes on.

Like the best history, this addresses the time the film is made as much as the time in which it is set. That is, its truth extends beyond its period and catches a continuing verity: US governments — and they are not alone —lie to advance their cause, to protect themselves, regardless of the cost in civilian lives and the violation of America’s famed democratic principles. In this respect the film is about 2018 as much as 1971. It makes Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee models for our time.
      So that opening battle scene is not Saving Private Ryan. It's saving America.

The film seems accurate in its general plot lines. Nixon tried to prosecute the NY Times for publishing the secret papers smuggled out by the idealist Daniel Ellsberg. The Times thus  silenced, the Washington Post stepped into the breach to publish more stories themselves. The Supreme Court supported the press 6-3, a split we can’t reasonably expect of today’s Right-biased Supremes. 

The major characters — Graham, Bradlee, Robert McNamara, Ellsberg — also ring true. Whether or not they made the speeches given them here, their deeds and their significance are consistent. 

Graham’s isolation — a widow standing against a Board of smug white men, indeed a government of white men — may be emphasized to advance the current assertion of women’s rights. That’s fair. So too the little girl’s initiative selling lemonade, the abused and admiring Latina intern, Bradlee’s wife’s separate life as an artist, and especially Kay’s triumphant stride away from the Supreme Court through a mob of reverent women, tacitly thankful for her liberating example. Graham’s valour justifies that elaboration. 

The film draws on two other popular genres, as well as the war film. Graham’s and Bradlee’s stubborn idealism harkens back to the James Stewart standards, Mr Smith, Mr Deeds, and all the other earnest heroes struggling through a morass of self-service and corruption to reaffirm America’s defining principles of freedom and equality. That’s the America that has to be recovered to make her “great again.” 

Spielberg also revives the great tradition of the newspaper film. The montage of newspaper front pages, the mechanics of the lino-typesetter, the literal lines of lead prose, the whirring monster presses and the trucks lighting up the dawn streets with bundles of the latest word — all that warms the cockles of any newsman’s heart. Papers may be dying, but their mythic heroism survives. Much like the theory of American democracy.
     Spielberg is a master director and here he’s working with a first-rate cast and story. Sure, it preaches to the converted. It won’t reform Trump or shoot a spine into any of his GOP enablers. But if it’s screened widely enough perhaps it will enlighten and embolden enough of the Republicans’ constituents to have some effect.