The Post

I saw this film first at the cinema and there was no doubt that we should screen it at our club. The sight of the old hot metal printing presses give the film a specific historical link, but the story itself seemed depressingly contemporary.

The Post

USA 2017        116 minutes

Director:          Steven Spielberg

Starring:            Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Ben Odenkirk and Tracy Letts   

“For all its period detail, however, this is an urgently contemporary tale, with Spielberg taking a break from preparing his forthcoming effects-heavy sci-fi thriller Ready Player One to turn The Post around in double-quick time. Hitting our screens as the current White House incumbent raves about news media being “the enemy of the American people”, The Post offers a reminder that “the founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role… to serve the governed, not the governors”. The film-making may hardly be groundbreaking, but this story is more relevant than ever, and it is told with wit, precision and understated passion.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar nominations for Best Film and Best Actress (Meryl Streep)
• Golden Globe nominations for Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Score (John Williams)
• A further 18 wins and 92 nominations

Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) is the proprietor of The Washington Post and Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) is its editor. When Bradlee obtains the Pentagon Papers, classified documents revealing the true picture of 30 years of US involvement in the Vietnam War, he and Graham have to fight attempts by Nixon’s White House to prevent their publication.

The screenplay for The Post by first time screenwriter Liz Hannah appeared on the annual Hollywood Black List of most liked screenplays not yet produced, and was picked up by a producer who assembled the team of Spielberg, Streep and Hanks for the project, the first time that all three had worked together. Spielberg then brought in Josh Singer, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Spotlight (2015), a film about journalists on the Boston Globe investigating the cover up of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, to work with Hannah as he had the on-set writing experience that she lacked. Spielberg himself halted pre-production work on another project after a casting setback and decided to direct the The Post himself, commenting "when I read the first draft of the script, this wasn't something that could wait three years or two years — this was a story I felt we needed to tell today”.

The film is essence a prequel to All the President’s Men (1976) about the exposure by Woodward and Bernstein of Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, and in the final minutes of the film it explicitly acknowledges the link with a brief radio news report of the initial burglary at the Watergate Building. Bob Woodward has subsequently written books about every US President since Nixon and Fear, his book on Trump’s presidency, became a global bestseller on its publication. The events portrayed in the film are generally true, although the screenplay does downplay the role that The New York Times had in breaking the story while emphasizing The Washington Post’s subsequent involvement: it was The New York Times that first published the Pentagon Papers, set the stage for the legal battle between the press and the US government and then won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its work.

The Post was named as one of the top ten films of the year by both Time and the American Film Institute.

This is the trailer:

Lincoln

This week we are screening a real historical epic: Lincoln.

Here are my notes:

Lincoln

USA 2012                    150 minutes

Director:                      Steven Spielberg

Starring:                        Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon-Levett and James Spader

Awards and Nominations

• Won two Oscars (including Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis) plus 10 nominations (including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Sally Field), Best Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and Best Music (John Williams)
• Won one BAFTA (Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis) plus nine nominations (including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay)
• A further 57 wins and 95 nominations

 “Steven Spielberg has made more obviously entertaining and more emotionally seductive movies than Lincoln, but this is for him the most brave and, for the audience, most demanding picture in the 40 years since his emergence as a major director.  It's a film about statesmanship, politics, the creation of the world's greatest democracy, and it's concerned with what we can learn from the study and contemplation of history.  Spielberg and his eloquent screenwriter, the playwright Tony Kushner, handle these themes with flair, imagination and vitality, and Daniel Day-Lewis embodies them with an indelible intelligence as the 16th president of the United States.”

Philip French

 In January 1865 Abraham Lincoln is fighting to get the Thirteenth Amendment, which will abolish slavery once and for all, through Congress.  It is the final months of the Civil War and the passage of the Amendment will free all slaves, not just those freed under his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

The film is based on Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Spielberg had been considering a film about Lincoln since 1999 when Goodwin first told him what she was about to write.  Spielberg commissioned an initial script from John Logan with Liam Neeson (who had worked with Spielberg on Schindler’s List) to be cast in the title role.  However the project was delayed and when work began again in 2010 it was announced that Daniel Day Lewis had replaced Neeson and that Tony Kushner had taken over as screenwriter.

Tony Kushner considered Lincoln "the greatest democratic leader in the world" and found the writing assignment daunting because "I have no idea [what made him great]; I don't understand what he did any more than I understand how William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet or Mozart wrote Così fan tutte”.  Kushner struggled with his material and after producing an initial 500 page draft which covered four months of Lincoln’s life he finally decided to concentrate on just the two months during which Lincoln was focussed on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

In a typically perceptive essay on History and Cinema Simon Schama speculates about films with historical subjects:

“If movie history is to get produced as box office with a conscience, it must serve one of two purposes: explain the Origins of Us or act as Augury of What Is to Come.  But this kind of history, whether designed as the genealogy of identity politics or a prudential political-investment service, seldom escapes the contemporary world that it claims to transcend.”

The chronology of the release of Lincoln clarifies its purpose.  It received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 8^th October 2012: a story of a lawyer who had adopted Illinois as his home state and who was elected president despite his lack of experience at a national level.  On 6^th November 2012 Americans re-elected Barack Obama as President:  another lawyer who had chosen Illinois as his home state, who had been criticised when he first campaigned for his lack of experience at a national level, and who had consciously launched his first presidential campaign at the Old Illinois State Capitol in Springfield where Lincoln had made one of his famous speeches.  

Here is the trailer: