In the not very distant past, the print media did more than just sell ads, push its own political barrow and fawn over celebrities. More remarkably, its investigative journalism and revelations frequently led to mass demonstrations of public outrage and, in the case of Richard Nixon, the impeachment of the president of the US. In 1971, details of a secret report commissioned by secretary of state Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and dealing with America’s involvement in the Vietnam War were leaked to the New York Times. Occupants of the White House, from as far back as Harry S Truman and including John F Kennedy, were all shown to be aware of the futility of the conflict, and all lied about it. A Supreme Court ruling prevented the NYT from continuing with its expose, leaving the Washington Post to take up the running. Stephen Spielberg’s fantastic new movie looks at the dilemma faced by the newspaper’s publisher, Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), a close friend of McNamara. She was initially undecided about whether to follow The Times’s lead, but was encouraged by her editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), who clung to the quaint idea that the freedom of the press is of paramount importance in maintaining the health of any democracy.
So the urgency to ‘publish and be damned’ weighed heavily on Graham’s shoulders and as she juggled the pros and cons she inadvertently began to make of herself, despite her classic conservatism, an icon of the emerging feminist movement. As a consummate filmmaker, Spielberg’s genius lies in his ability to tell a story with a minimum of fuss, but he neither over-simplifies nor dumbs it down. Harking back to a period before the relentless 24/7 news cycle reduced everything to mere ephemera, and to the days of ink and paper and rolling presses, Spielberg’s regular cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, finds enough unexpected, often jarring angles to create a mood of Hitchcockian suspense. Cinema is often inclined to take itself too seriously, but as social comment, this is unarguably an important
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