Another Lying Movie
The new Steven Spielberg historical drama The Post is a celebration of how Democrats turn lemons into lemonade via their control of the media.
A prequel to the 1976 Watergate movie All the President’s Men, the new movie recounts how the Democratic Washington Post used an embarrassing 1971 Democratic scandal—Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the LBJ administration’s secret history of its own incompetence and insincerity in Vietnam—to take its first tentative steps toward eventually teaming up with the Deep State (in the person of J. Edgar Hoover loyalist Mark “Deep Throat” Felt) to overthrow the elected Republican president three years later.
Spielberg rushed The Post into production just last spring for the usual anti-Trump reasons. After the media’s eight-year-long sabbatical/siesta during the Obama White House, it’s good to see some energy and animus against a president, even if it tends to be wildly hypocritical.
Of course, Spielberg is not exactly the most self-aware ironist, so The Post, an earnest celebration of how Big Media supports “the people’s right to know,” doesn’t quite get its own joke about how convenient it was for the Democratic press’ uneasy conscience over how little it had criticized JFK and LBJ to be salved by a press putsch against the Republican in the White House.
Despite the hurry, Spielberg is such an extraordinarily competent filmmaker that most aspects of the film turn out fine, other than 85-year-old John Williams’ sappy score.
The Post is even better than Spielberg’s not-at-all-bad 2015 film Bridge of Spies, with which it shares a color palette: dark gray with splashes of bruised-looking colors. Lenses are chosen for some reason to make supporting actors look slightly grotesque in the manner of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man comic-book movies and of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip. As New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal, for example, Michael Stuhlbarg is made up to resemble a younger Al Lewis as Grandpa Munster.
Still, despite Spielberg’s late-career turn toward the visually grotesque, The Post is a well-made historical drama, like its predecessor Argo, Ben Affleck’s 2012 effort to spiff up the Democratic brand by making a movie out of a rare Carter-administration success. With better acting than Argo, especially from Meryl Streep as Washington Post heiress Katharine Graham, The Post will appeal to grown-up audiences partial to the Democrats.
The post Another Lying Movie appeared first on LewRockwell.
Leave a Reply