THE POST
In Susan Lucy’s legacy-burnishing, celebrity-talking-head-loaded documentary Spielberg, writer Tony Kushner opines that when its subject — Hollywood’s most successful filmmaker ever, Steven Spielberg — is telling a tale from the past, he’s really reflecting on the present.
You can see it across Spielberg’s films: Munich, which Kushner co-wrote, recounted Mossad agents assassinating Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, but it was about America’s post-9/11 mood, and the questionable morals of yearning for vengeance. Bridge Of Spies’ Cold War ’50s courtroom drama was an open exploration of the contemporary treatment of spies, dissidents, and whistleblowers. When he’s explored America’s history of slavery —The Colour Purple, Amistad, Lincoln— it’s been a reflection on contemporary race relations, the old divisions that remain. Even Schindler’s List, a tribute to real-life survivors of the Holocaust and an open exploration of his own Jewishness, was delivered at a time in which the wars in Yugoslavia had devolved into ethnic cleansing; history, horrifyingly, repeating.
But never has a Spielberg film about the past seemed so patently, so pointedly about the present as The Post. Spielberg’s 32nd feature is a journalists-at-work movie that’s an open, proud successor to All The Presidents Men and Good Night, And Good Luck. Its tale of newspapermen’s mettle — penned by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, the latter of whom wrote the WikiLeaks flick The Fifth Estate, and co-wrote Oscar-winner Spotlight — recounts the real-life behind-the-scenes story of The Washington Post’s decision to publish excerpts of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971.
The papers were a mass leak in the era long before digital dumps; governmental employee Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned military strategist, smuggling top secret files out of his office, and painstakingly photocopying the pages of all 47 volumes. A historical record of American involvement in Vietnam — and, in turn, of duplicity in the public portrayal of the war — they were a political powderkeg; one whose public detonation infuriated then-President Richard Nixon, and would, ultimately, be linked to the imminent Watergate scandal.
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The Post opens with Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) in Vietnam; where soldiers, freshly facepainted to a chooglin’ soundtrack, are sent out into the horrors of war. But when he sees Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) spin private acknowledgment of the intractable war into public pronouncements of progress, disillusionment sets in, and a stand of defiance is soon to come.
Five years on, and Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), the first-ever female publisher of a US newspaper, is struggling to make her voice heard amongst a boardroom of grey-haired men in navy suits; the paper’s financial future tied to a risky float of an IPO. The talk of the office is the White House administration’s refusal to allow the Post’s chosen reporter (Carrie Coon) to cover the upcoming wedding of one of Nixon’s daughters; the attempted political control of a newspaper’s coverage — no matter how trivial the story — immediately sown at the film’s big theme.
After The New York Times —the big-league paper the Post dreams of being; embodied in the form of their smug publisher (Michael Stuhlbarg) — runs the first stories sourced from the Pentagon Papers, the Post’s newsroom is forced to catch up. From there, we get the familiar filmic sight of reporters going about their business, stories being broken, and a defiant editor (Tom Hanks, Hanksin’ it) remaining steadfast about this pursuit of the truth. It ends in that most Spielbergian place, the court-room, with All-American values — the freedom of the press, governmental responsibility, the legal system — all holding up when under attack, ideals more powerful than the men-in-power who’d abuse them. In Spielberg, the direct admits to being both optimist and patriot; and, once again, that’s on show with The Post.
But, as much as the film is about events in 1971, it’s clearly a clarion call for the here-and-now; a veritable valentine to the press in the face of a contemporary President who has no respect for it. There’s a telling line where Ellsberg, when being interviewed, says that he saw evidence of a leader who wished to run the country by themselves, and squash any criticism of their decision. In an inspired bit of real-history-splicing, Spielberg choses to portray Nixon solely by his real voice, with rants sourced from the infamous Nixon Tapes, recordings of him ranting to various underlings, filled with indignation and hubris. With the clarity of hindsight, the Nixon Tapes seem less like covert conversations revealing the bitterness, pettiness, and vindictiveness of a paranoid Republic President, more like the forerunner to Trump’s Twitter feed.
DARKEST HOUR
For two solid hours, you’re waiting for the speech. In Darkest Hour, Joe Wright —who, in his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, previously dramatised the Dunkirk Evacuation— portrays Winston Churchill’s first month on the job as British Prime Minister in May/June 1940; where the not-loved, oft-drunk First Lord of the Admiralty ascends to the top post only because no one else wants to be the one in charge when the war is lost. The amphetamine-charged German panzer divisions have rolled through France, and cool heads believe the only way to avoid an invasion is to engage in peace talks with Hitler. Luckily, Churchill isn’t a cool head; instead, he’s a roiling pot of emotions, prone to spill over —with tears, spittle, rage, or all-time-great orations— at any moment.
Darkest Hour is both a character study of a Great Man, and a portrait of behind-the-veil, backroom war-meetings, politicking, and visits to Buckingham Palace to meet with The Crown. Wright, always a fan of visual flourish, shoots the rabbit-warren of underground offices as discrete stage sets, has crane-shots wildly flying about parliament, and uses a recurring device that turns maps of battlegrounds into alive eye-of-God overheads. His direction seems like an over-corrective to its men-debating-in-rooms set-up, but fails to use its sense of motion to create real movement in the story.
Given the strange omnipresence of Dunkirk in cinemas over the past year —not just with Christopher Nolan’s mighty Dunkirk, but Their Finest and Churchill, as well— Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” speech has never been more famous. And, here, it’s the rousing climax, the film’s (anti-?) hero pounding the pulpit as he delivers modern Britain from its darkest hour, into the light of its most defiantly-patriotic moment. Which means, it feels a little like the whole drama (penned by screenwriter Anthony McCarten) is biding its time to get to the big showstopper; summoning less a feeling of delayed gratification, more of waiting around.
Just as the story is dominated by its main character, the film is dominated by Gary Oldman’s lead turn. Oldman recedes into the role, delivering an act in which both character-building and mimickry border on perfect. He’s aided by Kazuhiro Tsuji’s work of make-up and prosthetics, which are so important to the film’s success they get a big star-billing credit on close. Bad aging make-up can submarine even the most seemingly-bulletproof Oscarbait biopic —like Clint Eastwood’s horrifying Leo-starring J. Edgar— so, here, it must be praised when it doesn’t. Oldman’s performance works because you’re not distracted by his fake wrinkles; becomes a central turn strong enough to hang a film on. Not a great film, of course, but one that, at the least, justifies its own Oscarbait-biopic existence.
MARY AND THE WITCH’S FLOWER
Mary And The Witch’s Flower is the first film for Studio Ponoc, but the spirit of Studio Ghibli lingers throughout. The new studio was founded by a host of former Ghibliites, most notably director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a Miyazaki protégé who helmed The Secret World Of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There for Ghibli. Yonebayashi also did animation work on Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, and there’s the influence of all these films —and Miyazaki classic Kiki’s Delivery Service— throughout Mary.
It starts out with a Bond-worthy sting in which a red-haired witch steals magical seeds from a wooden clifftop fortress, pursued in her escape by shape-shifting, watery creatures; the whole prologue ending, in action-movie style, with an explosion. From there, we head into a familiar set-up for a children’s story: a young girl off to live with distant relatives in the mysterious countryside, full of resentment at being abandoned by her parents, and anxiety at being the new kid in town. Everything changes when, lost in the woods, she discovers a mysterious flower —luminous, psychedelic blueberries— which begets her magical powers, a broomstick with a mind of its own, and enrolment at a witch’s school, a candy-coloured, Onion-domed castle in the clouds.
In turn, the film is a riot of animation and imagination, an LSD-tinged vision of a magical realm that’ll please kids and animé nerds alike. Wizarding students traverse the campus in bubbles, on magic carpets and floating clouds. Spells swamp Mary in electric tornadoes. The wacky Doctor Dee, a moustachioed egghead with a swollen dome, gets about in a host of mechanical bodies, including in a giant spider. He presides over a program of Moreau-esque mutant monstrosity-makin’, his Godless beasts as wild as a lizard with a toadstool frill-neck and a crystal Koala; his ultimate goals occultist powers beyond your imagination, etc.
All this overthrowing-the-evil-Doctor’s-lust-for-power closing grandeur plays well as visual spectacle, and provides our tween heroine with a herculean task to overcome (even if the ultimate spell feels a little like the Ctrl+Z of the witch realm). But, compared to the pleasing domesticity of Kiki’s Delivery Service, the finale can feel a little too over-the-top; a grand swirl of animated magic marshalled in service of a film that, for all its coming-of-age warmth, both begins and ends like an action-movie.
