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.

THE HIDDEN MESSAGE YOU SHOULD TAKE FROM 'THE GIVER'

It must be the summer of dystopia, especially if you're a kid. My son Nate watched Divergent on the plane over to the US, and in North Conway, New Hampshire, I and my cousins took him to see The Giver. He's ten, and he's gone back and forth on which he liked better, but The Giver seems to have stayed with him better. My cousins were in the book trade, and knew the 1993 young adult novel by Lois Lowry well; I hadn't heard of it and obviously Nate hadn't read it. Apparently it's been adapted pretty faithfully, with one big change: the characters are older: 12 when they go through the ceremony and get their career paths in the book, but 18 (just like high school) in the film.

On the one hand, since The Giver is about a society designed to eliminate conflict by limiting people's emotions and choices, removing everything from sex to colour to music. Thus it's looked at as an allegory of conformity, a story of how individualism triumphs in the end. There's nothing very original in this, apart perhaps from its being directed at teens; you could point to dozens of sf novels and many recent movies that explore the same theme. I found it echoing Ayn Rand a bit too often; in this society conformity is enforced in part through the killing of babies, bringing a couple of the wingnut right's favourite tropes together.

On the other hand, it's appeal probably comes from the obvious allegory of the teenage years, kids faced with the alternatives of conformity or individuality, of following their families or following themselves. Jonas (Brenton Thwaits) has to choose between his own perceptions and feelings and those prescribed by commmunity and family. Take either approach, and the film of the The Giver reflects its 'young adult' source novel; neither allegory is particularly overloaded with ambiguity, and the world they inhabit sometimes seems to adjust itself to the storyline without full regard for its own internal logic. 

There are many times the story can't suspend disbelief: the kids can't help being kids and joke (and show jealousy). We see colours at times when we're supposed to be seeing black and white. Asher, as a drone pilot, has seen there is an outside world; we also wonder what the outside world has made of this city on a mountain top.It's the dystopian Waltons atop Walton Mountain, and Thwaits as Jonas is our century's Richard Thomas as John Boy. Jonas is also falling in love with Fiona (Odeya Rush, all wide eyes and open lips) and there's actual conflict with his best friend Asher (Cameron Monaghan, perhaps his generation's Peter Sarsgard) who becomes a drone pilot, whose drones somehow pass through the force field and transmit back to him only in black and white, even when they don't.

We also wonder what the community makes of the police who suddenly show up on motorcycles (not the uniform bicycles everyone else rides) and are adept at violence. We wonder how Jonas knows how to ride a motorcycle, much less make an Evil Knevil jump off a mountaintop. We then wonder where all the stuff Jonas has escaped with actually came from.

In this effort to try and suspend disbelief, while appealing to its target audience, The Giver is nicely done by director Philip Noyce, whose shots concentrate on individuals, as if to belie their environment, and by his DP, Ross Emery, who's especially taken with the contrast of the Giver's tower with the rest of the community, and the outside world with that too. He gives the snow scenes a gingerbread Christmas feel which implies the fairy tale we are watching. But it's impossible not to note that the film dissolves into a chase and survivalist race against time. Jonas and Gabriel have to sled through the force field surrounding the community, and reach Switzerland at Christmas, for the story to resolves itself.

In those terms, it's a showcase for Jeff Bridges, imparting wisdom to Jonas, who is appointed the Receiver of Memory and told that he alone in this society is allowed to lie. 'Precision of language' is one of the important points of keeping conformity. As the giver of memory, Bridges plays a cross between Gandalf and Leo Tolstoy, and almost literally opens Jonas' eyes to the big world out there. His antagonist becomes the head elder, played by Meryl Streep, but it will turn out that Bridges' last, failed pupil (played by Taylor Swift) was also their daughter, which raises a lot of questions about exactly how the asexual, apersonal birth process actually works.

 Jonas has also developed an attachment to Gabriel, a baby his 'father' (Alexander Skarsgard) has brought home from the maternity hospital; he's the weaker of two twins, and if he doesn't shape up, he will moved on to 'Elsewhere'. His father's compassion is unexplained within the constricts of the community; when he gives unacceptable babies a shot that stops them breathing, and sticks them in a box and drops them down a chute, it's hard to imagine what he thinks their fate would be. That he's married to an elder (Katie Holmes) makes it even stranger. And Holmes' presence as an elder is a question until you realise she's there for a purpose.

Because in reality, The Giver is about a far important subject than the making of a utopian society, or the progression of the cinema's remaining audience into adulthood. It's a topic far closer to Hollywood's heart.

The Giver is really an allegory about the fate of Katie Holmes.

When Jonas finally cracks the force field we see Holmes shedding a tear. Even Bridges, the one person allowed emotions hasn't done that.

And then we realise that The Giver is about someone who's been a true believer in a cult and has just had the realisation forced on her that what she has believed in was false. Does that suggest a certain cult founded by an sf writer and practiced by Holmes' former husband? Has she been given Alexander Skarsgard as penance? If Meryl Streep is the image of Ayn Rand as Scientologist, and Katie Holmes is her victim, what hope is there for the rest of us?

JULIE & JULIA & ME

I finally caught up with Julie & Julia on DVD -- and it's a very odd film indeed. Pleasant at times, entertaining at times, but it's like two different films stitched together; one a charming story of romance and the other a rather standard story of career struggle mixed with the difficulties of marriage a la Sex and the City. But first the odd but interesting...

Back in 1977 Meryl Streep played the wife of a Canadian hockey player, played by Michael Moriarty, in a film called The Deadliest Season; as I remember he spears an opponent with his stick, a kidney is ruptured, a hockey player dies, he is charged with manslaughter, she suffers bravely. I came up with a theory at the time that this film proved Streep would take any role as long as it allowed her to try a new accent, and nothing she has done since has worked to disprove that theory. Her Julia Child has the weirdest accent I've ever heard; like Marge Simpson playing Katharine Hepburn playing Margaret Dumont, but that isn't what makes the film odd: it works perfectly and Streep, aided by Stanley Tucci in yet another impeccable supporting role--his Eichman to her Heydrich yet again, is brilliant at conveying Child. Sometimes Streep stops short, letting the physical dominate, but though the temptation here must have been very strong, she gets inside the character and the outside follows. It's not an exaggeration to say I watched the film wishing I could fast forward through Julie to get back to Julia.

It is odd to see a story with two central characters who are so contrasting, in the very simple sense that one is basically unpleasant while the other is literally a hoot. The film is and, I assume, the book was self-aware enough to realise this--but Julie is not a very nice person to be around; her friends early in the film provide a freak show there to make her look better, while her friends later in the film are literally anonymous. It is because they exist only in so far as they reflect her, and she is so self-reflective they are unncessary. Her husband, who eats like an animal, which is amusing but doesn't ever get into the story, puts up with it with more sop than realism, but it is hard at any point to feel real sympathy. This makes it either a very brilliant performance by Amy Adams, playing shallow, or else a performance where no one realises that this is what she is.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, the format of parallel stories actually works. It's become old hat as a structure in the past decade or so, a way to short-cut any number of story-telling issues, especially when one of the characters is an historical figure. The fact that they are contemporaneous makes little difference, but it does add another dimension to the story. And that's where I find it really odd, and that's specifically around the whole question of blogging. I appreciate the irony that I am writing this on a blog, which is unlikely to be featured in the New York Times and thus lead to literary and film deals, and that my reactions are more than a day late and thus way more than a dollar short, but it seems to me that the crux of the difference between the characters lies as much in the times, and in the modes of expression, as in their very different personalities.

Partly, this is because the subject of French cooking was new for Julia, the idea of cooking on television was new, and partly because her manner of approaching them was all or nothing: she wrote for herself as she cooked for herself, not out of frustration at not being a writer but out of frustration from not being able to express her desire to cook and her joy in cooking in any other way. For Julie, it's a backdoor to being the writer she wants to be, not the cook she becomes, and to me the question of whether the film works depends on whether you believe that what she has really learned from Julia is simply 'how to cook' and whether that really has saved her life. I am not convinced--though I have to say that part of the reason for that may be down to my having read Julie Powell's article about her book Cleaving in the Guardian a few weeks back (you can find it here) in which she links herself to other celebrity adulterers and convinces me her husband Eric is indeed soppy, if not sappy. Or ex-husband, as the case may be. I wonder if his resentment at seeing himself in her blog resurfaced?

The blogosphere is a lot like the world of fanzines was before the internet came along, and it just made me wonder if what we were seeing was really a kind of parallel stage door story, only the stage door in our modern world requires much more concentrated solipcism to get through?

A couple of odd footnotes. Was it deliberate that Amy Adams' Julie pronounced boeuf 'boof, as in boof bourguignon? And when the movie appeared here, there were a number of reviews that criticised it for not mentioning Elizabeth David, who did for the British what Julia Child did for Americans. I'm not quite sure what that would have done for the story, and I doubt it would have made it any more baftalicious, not that that matters. And ask someday about my recipe for Chili Bourguignon, and how I nearly took it to the World Chili Championships in Terlingua, Texas.