THE POST: OSCAR WATCH IV

When looking at The Post, it's essential to keep the film's title in mind. Although it opens with a bravura scene of a fire-fight in the Vietnam jungle, a deathly chaos whose tracer lights illuminate Daniel Ellsberg's experience, it is not a film about Vietnam. Neither, despite the central presence of Robert McNamara as a catalyst for Ellsberg's decision to take the government's lies public, is it a movie about the Pentagon Papers. It is about the Washington Post, and its ascent to a position of national prominence alongside (or just behind) the New York Times. I've seen it said that the opening firefight serves as a visual metaphor for the Post's battles with the government (and the Times), but that idea, like the movie itself, does a huge disservice to Ellsberg. That's because the real centre of The Post is Katharine Graham's internal battle to assume control of her father's and husband's paper, and the means through which she is able to begin to enact her vision of being a major, quality daily. The problem is that Graham's story runs along a parallel track with the paper's search to beat the Times' exclusive, and Ben Bradlee's competitive journalistic drive keeps the action moving.

To his credit, Spielberg manages to bring the two strands together with some aplomb, at the moment Graham gives the order to 'print'. Her struggle is the more subtle, and repetitive, and it is difficult for Meryl Streep, as Graham to convey the depth of her insecurities, though she does well with what is presented. Graham's father, Eugene Meyer, had bought the bankrupt Post in the 1930s. When he retired, he made Kataharine's husband, Phil Graham, his successor. Graham was a manic depressive, and we learn that he killed himself. But part of his problem was his resentment of having been the son-in-law who rises, part that the Post was still a backwater paper in a company town, and he was at times abusive to Kay and the children: not least for her Jewishness. This backstory is instructive, because none of it is given away, instead Streep looks lovingly at Phil's photo. But if you're aware of it you can see better the roots of the insecurities which Streep delineates.

That she was taking the Post public at the very moment the government exercised prior restraint by getting an injunction against the Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers is true, and it is rightly presented as a Rubicon moment for her. She was risking her family's legacy, and the battle is encapsulated well by Tracy Letts, in another of his good-guy roles as Fritz Beebe, the family lawyer and chairman of the board.  He's set against Bradley Whitford, in a remarkable performance of unwillingly restrained anger and resentment, as board-member Arthur Parsons.

Graham also had her Washington social whirl, in which she was still playing the traditional wifely role, to consider. And it is an underplayed moment of decision when she sits down with McNamara (a brilliantly accurate performance from Bruce Greenwood, getting just the sort of moral incomprehension McNamara showed in The Fog of War) to tell him she will be publishing the Papers. Ironically, in later life Graham would seek injunctions similar to the government's against the Post, or take other actions against her putative biographers.

In a sense, when it comes to the newspaper side of the story, The Post is a cross between The Fog Of War and All The President's Men on the one hand, and on the other the classic newspaper drama, the kind of modern version we saw in, say, Ron Howard's The Paper. In fact, the most thrilling scenes in the movie, as in Howard's (a very Spielbergian director) are those that lovingly follow the dynamic of setting linotype, and then the rush of the presses as the papers roll off. The latter is something we've seen repeatedly, but watching the drama of the pages themselves getting set was literally inspiring.

All The President's Men lurks in the background. It's amazing to realise that the Post's first tranche of the Pentagon Papers literally fell on the desk of a reporter (who tellingly remains anonymous and excluded from the story itself) just as Deep Throat appeared in Bob Woodward's ear (at least as the movie version would have you believe). Bradlee's editorial ability to run with found gold is an important one, but it was the other Ben, Ben Bagdikian (played with a nice edge by Bob Odenkirk) who actually tracked down Ellsberg, whom he'd known at Rand, and got the Post their scoop. Which of course would not have been a scoop at all had not the Times been injuncted against printing; but of course as the film shows, the Post's running with their story opened the nation's floodgates.

Jason Robards' Oscar-winning feet-on-the-desk performance as Bradlee hangs over Tom Hanks too, but Spielberg and Hanks choose to play Bradlee not as Robards did, as a crotchety old-school journo, but as a sort of middle-class suburban businessman, closer to William Holden in The Corporation. The lemonade stand scenes remind us that Spielberg does like to frame the world from a child's view, but Hanks' Bradlee shows none of the society nous of his Boston Brahmin upbringing—Bradlee had come to the Post by facilitating Phil Graham's purchase of Newsweek, and was a mover in society almost as much as Graham. Kay Graham gets it right when she questions Bradlee's actually closeness to JFK himself (Bradlee's own book about it, Conversations With Kennedy, is an effort to convince himself as much as the reader that it was more) but Bradlee was also close to James Angleton of the CIA; his wife Tony Pinchot was the sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer, married to Cord Meyer (no relation to the Post's Meyer), another top-man at CIA; it isn't coincidental that Meyer was the brains behind the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, by which it acquired assets within the major media. When Mary (by then divorced from Cord) was murdered it was Bradlee who helped Angleton find and destroy her diary, in which her own relationship with Kennedy was supposedly detailed. But in this workd, even Bradlee's elite Georgetown townhouse is made to look like something from a suburban neighbourhood; Ben Bradlee is your good American Joe, pace Private Ryan.

In the end it's the Times that gets the media attention, with CL 'Punch' Sulzberger, like Graham the heir to the paper, and AM 'Abe' Rosenthal, its managing editor, facing the press when the Supreme Court decision in the papers' favour is handed down. Michael Stuhlbarg's caricature of Rosenthal (whose column, On My Mind, was universally derided as 'Out Of My Mind' in the days when he stepped down from editorship) is stereotypically amusing to the point of cruelty. When we hear Nixon's own voice on the tapes, I was a little surprised there were no tirades against the 'Jews', Tricky Dick saw both the Times and Post as being Jewish family affairs.

Spielberg ends the film with an ironic reference to never going through this again, when we all know that Watergate, which firmly put the Post on the dias with the Times, was just around the corner. He does another re-enactment of Frank Wills' discovery of the Watergate burglars—remember those were the same burglars whose ransacking of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office got the government's prosecution of the actual leaker thrown out of court. Spielberg likes to end his films with none too subtle conclusions, think of the graveyard scenes in Private Ryan or Schindler's List. The fate of Daniel Ellsberg, of course, is only feed for another movie.

The Post gathered Oscar momentum because it has an obvious correlative to our present times, Donald Trump and Fake News and the less stirring performance of our leading papers in their age of declining relevance. This was illustrated in passing by Spielberg in what  was, ironically, the best moment in the entire film (apart from the linotype and presses). It is an actual news clip of CBS television's Daniel Schorr explaining what exactly the government was doing by taking the Times to court to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers. Schorr does it in 30 seconds or so. He covers the issues, explains the legal tactic, and sets the stage for the movie better than it could do for itself. You can't imagine any of our present-day knights of the makeup room on television doing that now.

PARKLAND: FROM LONDON FILM FESTIVAL TO FIFIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

After opening in the London Film Festival, Parkland's release was delayed to coincide with the 50^thanniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, and presumably thus cash in on the notoriety and nostalgia.Though of course nostalgia is the wrong word, because we are talking about an audience that doesn't remember the event, doesn't remember the time, and thinks that Kennedy was a boring version of Don Draper. Parkland plays with this fondness for an idea of early 60s glamour, all Rat Pack skinny ties and Jackie pill-box hats and Chanel. But in its rather limited definition of who the real Mad Men are, it lets its audience down.In fact, if you kept a scorecard of Parkland you'd quickly realise the guys in the Mad Men threads are the good guys.

The good news is that although the credits say it is based on Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, his massively prolix redoing of Gerald Posner's Case Closed, the film doesn't subject us to a massive prosecutorial brief for the Warren Report. It does, however, retreat to the Warren conclusions, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone crazed assassin, and that assumption permeates everything that follows. Apparently, this was originally intended as a Band Of Brothers style mini-series, but it must have been evident that examining the assassination itself would quickly become far too tendentious, and that a Band of Conspirators scenario has already been done by Oliver Stone.

Produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's Playtone, what Parkland tries to be is a story about the personal lives are the crucible of the assassination and how the event focused its stresses on them, like a more serious version of Bobby. Hanks is, in some sense, Hollywood's American Everyman, heir to Jimmy Stewart perhaps, although there has always been an element of Forrest Gump's idiot savant or not so savant in that image. Parkland's cross-section of American everymen hold up well under fire, as it were, but where I find the film most pernicious is in its Gumpish assertion of not only respect for, but faith in, authority. The Secret Service, the FBI, everybody except perhaps the Dallas Police who threaten Oswald's brother Robert, are figures of huge competence. And I even got the feeling we were supposed to admire the red-blooded thirst for revenge by these square-jawed Ray Ban-wearing Texans. Billy Bob Thornton even gets a speech about the SS never having lost a president, as if oblivious to the one just lost on his watch. Instead, we see the SS jumping out of their motorcade cars at the hospital setting up a cordon armed with their Armalite rifles (one of which, according to one popular, though easily refutable, assassination theory, actually fired the fatal head shot). I've looked at every photo I can find, news film footage, and read recollections, and I can see no evidence this cordon ever existed. But what the visuals do is important to the film; they create an image of the fighters of terrorists keeping the public safe, drawing a quick line between Oswald as assassin and terrorism, and absolving authority of blame.

And that is the point, making Oswald into a terrorist. He's portrayed as both cocky and kooky, which is not that far off-base, but also dangerous (in fact, Jeremy Strong could just as easily be playing Snowden journalist Glenn Greenwald). That is enough to convince his brother (a tremendous performance by James Badge Dale) of his guilt, and if Oswald's own brother believes him guilty, what's left for the rest of us to decide? Jacki Weaver as their mother, seems to be channelling her inner Joan Allen without huge success; Mrs. Oswald was a strange woman who did warm to the spotlight, but she was also shrewd enough to sense that there was more going on behind the scenes with her son. But her obvious delusion in the film negates her assertion that Lee was some kind of government agent.

Which he more than likely was—either when he 'defected' to Russia and/or came back. It is highly likely that Oswald was acting as an informant for somebody—the rumour at the time, that it was the FBI, has never been refuted convincingly, and which puts Parkland's approach to the whole agent James Hosty (well played in this light by Ron Livingstone, the closest to Don Draper Parkland actually gets) story in a different light. Of course embarrassment was the reason for many of the cover-ups around the assassination investigations, and cover-up can begin to look like conspiracy, but the destruction of Hosty's memo, and other missing files higher up the food chain quite likely represent more than mere embarrassment. But examining the many anomalies in the case, the approach which comes closest to explaining them is the assumption that Oswald was an informant, as shown convincingly in Oswald Talked and that he was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy.

Where Parkland falls down worst, however, is at the hospital itself. Zac Efron is our Forrest Gump, MD, driven to exhaustion and beyond by the pressure of working on the president, with only nurse Marcia Gay Harden for support. More importantly, we never see doctors describing JFK's throat wound as a wound of entry (the tracheotomy performed immediately destroyed that evidence), we never see them repeatedly identifying the fatal wound's being above and to the front of the right ear, not in the right rear of the head. When the Secret Service steal the body from the Dallas coroner before he can perform an autopsy, we are presented with forthright professionals protecting a corpse from further terrorism. We never learn of the farcical autopsy conducted at a military hospital. Most puzzling of all, we never see Jack Ruby, who will soon be the star of his own murder, this time on live television instead of home movie film, at Parkland, where he most definitely was. Later he would pop up at Police HQ, and even interject a helpful correction about Oswald's background as a commie radical into one of the press conferences.

Instead of Jack Ruby, we get Abraham Zapruder, as played by Paul Giamatti, who understandably starts out fearing for his safety because he has the best record of the killing, but soon gets turned from home-movie maker to a sort of nascent film producer, shrewdly selling the rights to Life Magazine (where stills would be printed in the wrong order to make it look as if the fatal shot drove Kennedy's head backwards). What is amazing is the way the Secret Service and FBI not only defer to Zapruder and his property, but actually do what they promise they will do, and give him back a copy of the film. We've come a long way from that in 50 years.

I suppose that when Parkland ends, in Gump or Private Ryan fashion, with the moral uplift of Walter Cronkite's encomium to tolerance and understanding, it will not ring hollow in the light of the five decades that followed. But Parkland's faith in our institutions, and blind acceptance of the power of the long crazed madman, may suit our post 9/11 America, but it rings hugely false for anyone with a memory. It will probably gain much unwarranted respect from those who don't.

Parkland played at the London Film Festival, and will be released on 22 November

NOTE: this essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)