At the end of Citizen Kane, the nameless reporter, who has pursued the mystery of Charles Foster Kane’s last word “Rosebud,” stands with his colleagues amid piles of the great man’s possessions and admits he hasn’t been able to figure out what it meant. “What have you been doing all this time?” they ask.
“Playing with a jigsaw puzzle.”
The sixth and final season of Better Call Saul begins with homage to that famous ending, only instead of executors taking inventory of a mogul’s estate, it’s the government seizing the property of fugitive lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). Like Breaking Bad, the show it serves as a prequel to, it’s the story of how a fairly normal guy becomes an epic villain. Only in the case of Better Call Saul, we’ve always known where this is going. It’s like Titanic — we know the ship is going to sink; it’s all about the details of how it happened.
When the season begins, Jimmy McGill is more successful than ever, but he’s already in over his head farther than he knows. His new solo criminal practice under the name Saul Goodman is thriving, and he’s flush with cash thanks to his star client, Mexican drug cartel kingpin Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton). He’s blissfully unaware of carnage unfolding south of the border, where Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) has ordered a hit on Lalo in his own home — a big no-no in the cartel world. His man on the inside, Nacho (Michael Mando), did his job by unlocking the gate for the gunmen. It’s not his fault that they killed everyone in the house but Lalo, including burning to death the Salamanca family’s beloved grandmother, but he’s the one who’s left without a chair when the music stops.
Meanwhile, back in Albuquerque, Saul and his power-lawyer wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) are pursuing an elaborate scheme to win a long-running lawsuit by framing their former boss Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) for cocaine possession. Their machinations generate some much-needed comedy in the persons of Betsy and Craig Kellerman, former clients whose transparent viciousness makes them easy marks.
Then, showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould deliver one of their patented rug-pulls. When the Kellermans get wise to the scheme, Saul wants to simply bribe them into silence, but Kim’s solution is so vicious and cold-blooded, it actually shocks Saul. Kim is Better Call Saul’s richest character, and biggest surprise. The woman we met as a try-hard do-gooder, whose attraction to the bad-boy screwup is a mystery to everyone, has emerged as the show’s Lady Macbeth. Of all of the show’s drug lords, street bosses, criminal lawyers, and lawyers who are criminals, she is the most dangerous because no one knows what she wants. Her quest to ruin Howard is unnecessary, and her methods — as fun as they are to watch — are excessive and dangerous. Surely, an operator as shrewd as she understands the risks, so what does she see that we don’t?
The most ironic aspect of this story that revels in earned irony is that the only displays of virtue come from the most hardened, violent criminals. Nacho’s operatic demise in episode 3, “Rock and Hard Place,” grows from his desire to protect his father from the consequences of his life of crime. It’s Fring’s enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut’s (Jonathan Banks) principled stand against civilian casualties that ultimately saves his boss’ bacon when Don Hector (Mark Margolis) starts asking uncomfortable questions about who tried to whack Lalo.
Artistically, Better Call Saul has no rivals on television. The show routinely pulls off bravado shots few would dare attempt, and the writing team is at the top of its game. Since it’s the last season, the executives at AMC seem to have given them carte blanche to do all the crazy stuff that enters their heads.
For all that, Better Call Saul’s artistry is not indulgent. It’s disciplined, visually inventive, emotionally affecting, character-driven filmmaking of the highest order. The most mundane detail, like Kim’s discarded wine-stopper, can become the setup for an emotional punch line. Even the most outlandish moments feel real.
And wither Saul Goodman? Will we end the series understanding how he broke so bad? The opening Citizen Kane reference suggests that the exercise is ultimately futile. The boat sinks, and we may never truly understand why.
The March sisters: Meg (Emma Watson), Amy (Florence Pugh), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen)
For Never Seen It, I convince someone interesting to catch up on a classic (or maybe not so classic) film they’ve missed, then we talk about it. This time around, I got the boss, Anna Traverse Fogle, CEO of the Flyer‘s parent company Contemporary Media, to watch director Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was 19 on my list of the 25 Best Films of the 2010s. Our quite lengthy conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Little Women?
Anna Traverse Fogle: Book or movie?
Chris: More like, what is your relationship with Little Women?
Anna: I remember reading the book when I was a fairly young person myself. I was one of those kids who the librarians would laugh at because I would walk up to the librarian’s desk with a foot-tall stack of books. And they’re like, “You’re not going to read all of those, little girl.” And I was like, “You watch me.” I was pretty young, which means both that it made something of an impression on me, and also that I don’t remember it all that well. I remember the characters to some extent. I remember liking the beginning, and I remember it kind of losing my interest at some point. When I was in the earlier portions of the book, I was more like, “These are characters I can relate to.” And then as they got older, I think maybe I couldn’t relate as much. I certainly remember thinking of them — this is a child’s perception — but sort of in the same way that I had a relationship with a character than, like, the Laura Ingles Wilder books. I was not thinking about them critically, but thinking more in terms of who am I the most like. Whose personality traits do I want to be? So I was thinking about it in that very inner kind of way.
Chris: I think for a lot of girls, for a long time, the question of which of the March sisters you’re like was kind of like which of the Hogwarts houses you belong to.
Anna: Or which of the Sex and the City girls you relate to. And somehow, once you have identified which archetype of young woman you are, then you will understand other pieces of information that you would like to have about yourself.
Chris: Okay. Let’s do this.
Acting!
135 minutes later…
Chris: Anna Traverse Fogle, you are now someone who has seen Little Women. What did you think?
Anna: I mean, it’s changed me as a person.
Chris: Okay! That’s great!
Anna: It brought back more of the book that I realized was still in my head. Although I don’t know enough that I could speak to the distinctions between book and film. I don’t remember that the book did any of the temporal switching, which I found … I kind of got around it over the course of things. But you know, I’m a sleep-deprived, addle-minded person today. There were a few moments in the beginning when I was like, where are we? Then I clued in. I mostly liked that, but I did find it took a little bit of getting used to for me.
Chris: I think that was the big thing [director] Greta [Gerwig] brought to it, because she was hired to write the screenplay. And when [producer Amy Pascal] read the screenplay, and then saw Lady Bird, she was like, “Yeah, you should just direct it.”
Anna: I thought it ended up working really well — and added texture. It made it something other than just, “Let’s try to do a somewhat faithful adaptation of a much-beloved book.” It made it feel more like something that made sense as a film. That’s not something I think would have worked as well in any other format. In terms of, how do we re-imagine this novel as a film, that, to me, really made it something that felt like a work of cinema, and not like, “Let’s sit around and talk about how I like the book better. Well yes, of course everybody likes the book better. This made them operate more like independent works of art.”
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson
Chris: You’re gonna have to cut a whole lot from the book no matter what you do. I think the genius of the way she structured it is that you don’t realize what’s gone until it’s over.
Anna: Right. Because you aren’t watching it unfold from beginning to end. It turns it into this kaleidoscopic experience where it’s like, now I’m here, now I’m here, now I’m here. So you’re getting all of these elements, but you aren’t like “Oh gosh, They left out that bit I remember really well from the book,” because it’s coming at you in a different sequence.
Chris: She really handled the transitions so well. I mean, you’re a writer and editor. You know what a hard job that was.
Anna: Yeah, no kidding. And again, this is going to go back to how very long it’s been since I read the book, but I feel like there are some elements of the book that everybody probably remembers that she ended up having to decide, that’s not going to make it into the film because that’s going to take us off into some other direction that isn’t going to work. But I thought in terms of the spirit of the characters, it very much captured each one of their personas.
Chris: The casting just could not be better.
Anna: If you had some mental image of these characters in your head from when you read Little Women when you were 12, these people somehow are them. The casting job has to be really good if Meryl Streep is there, and you’re sort of like, “Oh yeah, this is Meryl Streep.”
Chris: She’s an important character, but not one that you actually see all that much of, relatively speaking.
Anna: She’s not stealing it. Nor does she want to. She’s someone who can be that character.
Chris: Aunt March is so great, and I love how Greta deploys her because this can be a saccharine or at least a very sweet story. But whenever it starts to get too sweet, you get a little bit of Aunt March. She literally one time says, “I’m so sick of this,” and rolls her eyes and walks off.
Anna: Right! If things are getting a little bit too sentimental, and isn’t it great, and they love each other so much and blah blah blah … Well, let me give you some witty rejoinder and caustic remark. And then we can return to what we’re here to do.
Chris: Her job is to take the piss out of the thing.
Meryl Streep takes no guff as Aunt March.
Chris: I personally am a Jo, even as a guy. Because she’s a writer.
Anna: I mean, she is such a writer, and I have to say, perfect for my little literary slash editor slash book junkie heart. Before I was working in media, I did a stint as an undergrad as a very, very low-level helper person at the University Press. All of these things combined to make these scenes of the book creation process so meaningful. When Jo’s locking herself in the attic, as someone who writes, I both understand what impels her to do that, and I can never imagine having a moment in my life when I can give into it. Who has that kind of time, to lock themselves in an attic for several days and write reams of pages? I liked the great shots of all of the pages she’s got lined up on on the floor. And then later when the book is being put through the printing press and assembled and stitched and the cover is being attached to it, I was like …
Chris: Oh yeah! The book-binding montage just killed me this time.
Anna: It made me wish that, instead of cooking shows, there would just be shows about, “Now I’m going to put together a book and show you how.”
Chris: I would so watch that.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (3)
Chris: The only casting that pulls me out of it is Bob Odenkirk as the dad. I mean, he’s great, but …
Anna: The character is a little out of place.
Chris: Nobody cares about the dad. We get to know this group of people as a self-sustaining entity, and then all of a sudden, “Oh, he’s back!”
Anna: Marmee has a husband, and they have a father, and he’s in the house. But he’s a little bit like, wandering over to the corners, like “Where do I fit here after all of this?” I guess that was actually the way it was meant to be.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that. At one point in my note — you know, I take note, because I’m a pro-fessional — I have “0.0% male gaze” … This is a movie made by women, about women, for women.
Bob Odenkirk as Father March
Anna: You’re probably right that it’s for women. I’d be curious to look at the gender breakdown of the theatrical audiences. I have a sense that if you’re in an opposite sex relationship, probably more women were dragging their male partners to see it than vice versa. Maybe that’s just my assumption.
Chris: I think when I saw it in the theater that I was the only male there. [Laughter] I loved it, though, because it’s such a perfect movie. There’s not a wasted scene.
Anna: I had a few moments where I felt like it almost felt like the actors were clearly people in 2019 speaking the dialogue of people 150 years ago. It didn’t happen very often. For the most part, it felt very natural coming out of their mouths.
Chris: Well, the naturalism of the acting comes from mumblecore. Greta Gerwig came up from the American DIY underground. She was an actress in Joe Swanberg movies. That’s the only thing to really survive from that movement, how the dialogue overlaps. That’s very modern, very Robert Altman.
Anna: I did notice the people talking over each other. It felt very natural. Of course people who happen to be living in the 19th century wouldn’t magically have always waited their turn in line to speak, especially if they’re in a room full of their families. But I think that’s often how our film versions of novels, or just films that are set in quote unquote “the olden days.” You know, I say my nicely crafted line and then give you sufficient air space to say your nicely crafted line, and we just go back and forth. Nobody talks like that. I doubt people ever have. I love the sense that the dialogue really felt like spoken dialogue.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn
Chris: She has fun with it. So many of these classic works, I think when people approach them, they are kind of intimidated by them. They’re like, “I have to have a reverence for this work.” And it sucks the fun out of it. You see that in lit classes all the time. But all these women are having just a blast. It shows in a movie, to me, when the actors are actually having fun.
Anna: I have to think this was probably so refreshing for everyone involved. This goes back to what you were saying about the absence of the male gaze. I’m sure that translated every day they were on set. Like how are we going to put this thing together? I don’t know, but we’re gonna figure it out and we are not being subjected to anybody’s opinion but ours. We don’t have to feel the burden of that set of expectations, and let it play out in the way that feels natural.
Chris: And nobody’s gonna get naked. Timothée Chalamet, who is Laurie, he’s the babe in this movie — the man-bimbo.
Himbo Timothée Chalamet as Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence.
Anna: If anything, there is a little bit of the opposite of male gaze there. It’s like, “Okay, yeah here’s this guy. He’s going to be the love interest. But let’s not actually make him too interesting or too engaging.” He always feels a little bit, frankly, not quite up to par.
Chris: He’s a drunken lout for about half the movie.
Anna: Well, there is that. But like once he’s not, he still feels a little bit like he wants to be on their level, but he’s not.
Chris: Yeah, there’s a feeling that Amy settles, even though she says she’s been in love with him the whole time.
Anna: He didn’t always quite realize that. It did feel a little bit like she was thinking, “Okay, well, I guess I need to make something happen. So here’s this guy I’ve known for a long time. I guess it’s kind of in the cards, so here we go.” Jo, of course, is like, “I think I would be perfectly happy never to marry. Well, it’s not perfectly happy, but maybe that’s my destiny. I can accept that, and I can do other things. I could have interesting pursuits, and I can craft a life for myself.” I think having that level of understanding and independence and ability makes it easier for her to forge a path.
Chris: She is sort of a proto-modern woman. She’s the one that you can relate to the most from the 21st century, because she wants to have a career.
Anna: That’s not going to be an either/or proposition for her, between having a career and having love interests she pursues. I think in any scenario, she takes the career, if it becomes an either/or thing. That’s not something that was all that acceptable. We talk about the 21st century, but if it becomes an either/or thing between finding someone marriageable or having an interesting and fulfilling career … Well, it is certainly not an assumption for everybody that women are going to necessarily pick the career.
Chris: That’s the point of Amy’s speech. The actress who plays Amy is Florence Pugh, and that speech, “Marriage is an economic proposition,” she plays it to perfection.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (2)
Anna: That felt so finely crafted and yet quite believable that that would be coming out of her mouth exactly the way it emerged. It would have been perfect if she had delivered that in any format. It’s something that, if she prepared to send in a letter, and labored over it for hours, she could not have done better.
Chris: That was such a moment of absolute, deep-down clarity. I think she sees herself better than Jo sees herself. For all of Amy’s faults, and you could say that she’s a retrograde or reactive character, but she understands herself better than anybody else in the whole story.
Anna: I mean she seems to be someone who was like, “Okay, look I’m not I’m not at the same level that you know that Jo is, but I’ve got this going for me, and I can make these decisions, and I think I can make this work.” I think that comes along over the course of things. Part of the beauty of that speech is that you’ve seen some of it developing in her, but at that moment you’re like, “Okay. Yeah. This is exactly how she’s thinking.”
Chris: And also, that line Laurie has right before the speech, “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses?” That really rings.
Anna: But in his case, it’s an accidental truth, know what I mean?
Jo and Laurie take a walk in the New England countryside.
Chris: Would you recommend this movie to other people?
Anna: Yeah, I totally would. I had fully intended to see this movie when it came out and didn’t. I will tell you I don’t go to that many movies in the theater, so for me even to have considered the possibility of going is an indication that I was quite interested. Honestly, most of the movies we were going to see in the theater are something in the Marvel universe with my stepson. But yeah, I would absolutely recommend it to really anybody. It’s easy to say that, if you happen to fall into a similar demographic as me, or if you’re interested in feminism, blah blah blah … And yes, this is a movie for you if you just like New England and autumn! It made me really miss living in Massachusetts.
Chris: How long did you live in Massachusetts?
Anna: Only three years. I was in grad school up there, but felt very at home. I lived in the Boston metro area, but it’s so easy to drive into those little towns where the fall is the most beautiful fall you’ve ever seen. There’s just something about that you can’t duplicate anywhere else. There were a few moments where I was like, “Oh gosh yes, I need to go back to New England in the fall.”
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle
Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) offers 50% off felonies in Better Call Saul.
Here’s the trouble with prequels: Their ostensible reason for being is to explore an intriguing backstory suggested by their parent story. But here’s the rub: If the backstory was that interesting to begin with, it should have been the original focus of the story. Prequels are always at a disadvantage, story-wise.
This might be a daunting problem for most writers, but showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are not most writers. Now, seven episodes into their fifth season of the Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, they’re using the story of small-time shyster Jimmy McGill’s transformation into sleazy lawyer par excellence Saul Goodman to draw some of the deepest characters ever attempted on television. Like Titanic, we all know the ship is going to sink, and the important part is how it looks to the people on deck.
Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk
This penultimate season has been about the characters’ duality, the gaps between how they present themselves to the different people in their lives, and what that says about who they are inside. Bob Odenkirk has been masterful in his presentation of the slide from Jimmy the screw-up prankster to the calculating, creepy Saul. Jimmy/Saul is, like any expert manipulator, a fine observer of people. But his blind spot is himself. He can fine-tune his personal presentation to fit the audience he needs to con at the moment, but he is either unwilling or unable to turn his piercing insight inward. The closest he comes in season 5 is the end of episode 7, “JMM,” when he sees the family of a person his drug lord client Lalo (Tony Dalton) murdered. But his crisis of conscience is short-circuited when he sees his old nemesis, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) and explodes in a self-aggrandizing tirade that buries Jimmy under an avalanche of Saul.
Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring
But that’s only one of a slew of great performances. Giancarlo Esposito’s stone cold demeanor as Gus Fring, the meth kingpin disguised as a fast-casual restaurant owner, is as nuanced a performance as you will ever see. Unlike Jimmy/Saul, Gus — who, it is hinted, was a soldier before he was a drug lord — knows himself, and the clarity of his self-knowledge is his greatest strength. In season five, we find that Gus tries to balance the evil that he does with good works back home in rural Mexico. His interior steel brings his fixer Mike (the brilliant Jonathan Banks) out of his funk after having to execute a friendly German engineer last season.
Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler
This season’s surprise MVP, it’s Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler, Jimmy’s super-lawyer girlfriend. She alone sees the struggle between Jimmy and Saul, and tries to put a finger on the Jimmy side of the scale. Kim is the most ambivalent of them all. She reacts to Saul’s betrayal, which endangers her brilliant career, by forcing him into a marriage that is clearly the best thing that could happen to the guy. But, as her blowhard client Kevin (Rex Linn) points out to her in a rare moment of clarity, she could do so much better than Jimmy. Her ultimate goals, and how she intends to get there, remain a mystery.
Better Call Saul’s emphasis on character has been at the expense of the twisty, intricate narratives Breaking Bad did so well. The exception was episode 2 of season 5, “50% off,” where Saul Goodman’s introductory special of half-off felony defense representation sparks an epic crime binge that becomes the catalyst for Jimmy’s spiraling entanglement with the Salamanca drug cartel. A recurring theme has been meta-commentary on filmmaking itself. There’s a lot of overlap between the legal profession and acting, and Gilligan and Gould have found ways to blur the lines between the two. At one point, Saul becomes a director when he and his film student friends produce a TV commercial to gain leverage in a case against the Mesa Verde bank.
Breaking Bad helped launch the era of “prestige television,” and while it has spurred many imitators, its high points have rarely been equalled. Better Call Saul’s effortless virtuosity gives you what you really want out of a prequel — a chance to return to a familiar world and live there for a little while.
Long Shot is a new film starring Seth Rogan and Charlize Ther…
ALL HAIL IMPERATOR FURIOSA, WARRIOR OF THE WASTELAND, CONQUERER OF THE CITADEL!
I’m sorry. That happens sometimes when I try to talk about Charlize Theron. She is one of our greatest living screen actors, with dozens of film credits and an Academy Award she earned for playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster. But for many cinephiles, she is now indelibly associated with her role in Mad Max: Fury Road, where she stole the show from the title character of George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece.
Furiosa is an icon of female power, and liberation from the patriarchy. In Long Shot, Theron plays Charlotte Field, the blisteringly competent Secretary of State under President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk) who is blisteringly stupid.
Before we continue drooling over Furiosa, I want to praise Odenkirk, director Jonathan Levine, and writers Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah. Long Shot is a romantic comedy, but its setting is contemporary American politics, which is a bloody minefield. The overwhelming presence of the orange criminal in the White House threatens to crowd out any comedy potential. And yet, he must be acknowledged in some way. Chambers is clearly not Trump, but Odenkirk plays him as a distracted, incompetent, and thoroughly corrupt rube, because portraying the president as a reasonably competent patriot would simply be unbelievable in 2019. That’s where we are as a nation.
Anyway, Charlotte is a Hillary-esque figure trying her best to put together an international agreement to curb climate change. She’s also in the midst of putting together a run for the presidency herself, assisted by Maggie Millikin (June Diane Raphael) and Tom (Ravi Patel), her fiercely loyal aides.
Meanwhile, Seth Rogan plays Fred Flarksy, a crusading investigative journalist whom we meet in the middle of a farcical attempt to infiltrate a group of neo-Nazis. Fred finds out his newspaper is being bought by Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), a Rupert Murdoch stand-in who will stymie Flarsky’s truth seeking. Fred quits in a rage, and his rich friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) takes him to a ritzy party to help him forget his troubles. There, he sees Charlotte, who he remembers used to babysit him when she was a hyper-responsible pre-teen and he was even more awkward than he is now.
‘They’re called fingers, but have you ever seen them, like, fing?’
The party scene, which is long and complex and ends in horrible (read: hilarious) humiliation for Fred, is a joy. It’s a fine piece of comedy writing, well-staged by the director and effortlessly executed by the cast, that seamlessly integrates the personal and political. When the dust clears, Fred has a new job as a speech writer for Charlotte, and a new, very unlikely romance is brewing—a “long shot”, if you will.
Is there any more tired cliche than the perfect woman romantically paired with a schlubby guy? From Married With Children to The Simpsons, it’s been pretty much the norm on TV sitcoms for decades. And yet, somehow, we come out believing that the guy who wrote an article called “The Two Party System Can Suck A Dick (Actually Two Dicks)” could get it on with the Secretary of State. Theron and Rogan present the ideal avatars of the stereotypes as they fall in love during the film’s globe-hopping middle acts. Rogan’s got the comedy chops to spare, and Theron…
HAIL IMPERATOR FURIOSA!
…Theron is an effective straight woman. Director Levine wisely doesn’t saddle her with schtick, but uses her acting skills strategically. In one rollicking sequence, Theron gets laughs with a realistic impression of a partier rolling on MDMA. She doesn’t go big and mug for the camera (that’s Rogan’s job) she just delivers the lines while low-key trying to keep it together. The implied joke that maybe negotiations between politicians would go better if one or both parties were on drugs that enhanced their empathy lands naturally.
The way Long Shot differentiates itself from the sexist sitcom cliche is by exploring the difficulty men have in ceding power to women, even if—perhaps especially if—the women are clearly more skilled and intelligent. Frank thinks he’s woke as he can get, but time and again he runs up against his own self-righteousness and unexamined assumptions. As the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl rom-com cycle plays out, he’s just trying to hang on as she is making the kind of career-over-home decisions that a male character would be saddled with in earlier decades. By the time the When Harry Met Sally-inspired denouement rolls around, the couple have found a unique equilibrium that they are still trying to understand. Maybe that’s the portrait of all successful relationships that the romantic comedy, when done right, points us towards.
Lesson number five in Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century is “Remember Professional Ethics.” Snyder writes, “When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitment to just practice becomes more important.”
Few people have ever accused Hollywood of having “professional ethics.” Long gone are the days when Dalton Trumbo would write a patriotic paean like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and then get hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his troubles, or where John Sturges could condemn Japanese internment with Bad Day at Black Rock, or where Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford could star in All the President’s Men and make it one of the biggest movies of the year. Nope, these days it’s all $100 million toy commercials and fascist dreck like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Do successful filmmakers have a duty to the Republic? Don’t make Michael Bay laugh into his Porsche collection.
This is why, even if The Post wasn’t a rip roaring great movie, it would still be a remarkable presence in the theaters of 2018. At age 71, with an estimated net worth of $3 billion, Steven Spielberg didn’t have to make this movie. Producer Amy Pascal, former head of Sony, didn’t have to pony up for a script by struggling screenwriter Liz Hannah about Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post in the Watergate era. Who in their right mind would do such a thing when My Little Pony is just hanging there, ripe for transformation into a cinematic universe?
Maybe they did it because The Post is the movie that needs to be made right now. Maybe that’s the same reason Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks signed on, as Graham and Post editor Ben Bradlee, respectively.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep lead a star-studded cast in The Post, Steven Spielberg’s remarkable new film about the release of the Pentagon Papers
Hanks has another potential reason: He’s an obsessive typewriter collector, and the newsrooms of 1971 would be like Candyland for him. Dial-up phone fans will also be in heaven for the 116-minute running time. So will political junkies and actual patriots who value the First Amendment, the separation of powers, and representative democracy.
If you’re a fan of good film craft — as all right-thinking people should be — you will flip for The Post. Spielberg may be the best steward of old-school film grammar we have left, and all of the classic virtues are on display. The Post tells the story of the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, which explained in great detail that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and the U.S. Government knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable as early as 1965, a full decade and tens of thousands of casualties before it ignominiously ended. It is that most dreaded of script genres: People talking in rooms without brandishing guns. The practice of journalism is mostly people on telephones, or as film producers call it, slow box office death. There probably aren’t five people on the planet who could have pulled off this story with the same excitement and urgency as Spielberg. What most contemporary directors would take five cuts to accomplish, he can do with a focus pull, such as when Bradlee crashes Graham’s birthday party with urgent clandestine news, and Spielberg meticulously reveals McNamara, the one person who can’t know what’s going on, in the crowd. The director is in complete control of where your eyes are focused on the screen at all times, and it feels great, not intrusive or forced. Information is revealed at exactly the right pace, and dense exposition flows like drawn butter.
Hanks leads a murderer’s row of contemporary acting talent that includes Sarah Paulson as Bradlee’s wife Tony, Bob Odenkirk as reporter Ben Bagdikian, Matthew Rhys as leaker Daniel Ellsberg, Jesse Plemons as Post lawyer Roger Clark, and David Cross as reporter Howard Simons. But it’s Streep who shines brightest. Graham starts the film as a socialite and dilettante as interested in rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful as she is in running a paper. By the end, she walks determinedly out of the Supreme Court to be greeted by a silent phalanx of young women looking to her example of powerful, patriotic womanhood. Streep’s arc is one of the most finely shaded and complex of her storied career. The Post pursues the personal, the political, and professional spheres of life all at once, and its story of putting duty to country and humanity over personal loyalty and professional advancement couldn’t be more timely. I hope this group of artists’ example is seen far and wide in our troubled country.
W/Bob and David (2015; dirs. Keith Truesdell, Jason Woliner and Tom Gianas)—
Last weekend I sailed into the Netflix maelstrom for the first time, and even though I occasionally felt like I’d stumbled across the 21st-century version of The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, it wasn’t too bad. Aziz Ansari’s new series Master of None is pretty great, and that single-take hallway fight scene from the second episode of Daredevil is as thrilling as ever. But I was also happy to check out the four episodes of W/Bob and David, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’ return to televised sketch comedy after a nearly two-decade break.
Odenkirk is best known as Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul fame; in a just and fair world, everybody would recognize Cross from his role as Dr. Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development. Alt-comedy aficionados will remember these two abrasive, committed writer/performers as the co-stars of Mr. Show With Bob and David, which aired on HBO from 1995 to 1998. Mr. Show specialized in detailed, foul-mouthed, loosely linked skits that frequently pursued an idea up to and then far past its logical endpoint; at its best, it was the closest an American show ever came to re-imagining Odenkirk’s beloved Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There’s more of the same kind of thing in W/Bob and David, but this time around there’s a distinctly weird and confrontational Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! vibe in places. Take the animated opening-credits sequence, which depicts various characters dissolving into and bursting out of each others’ eyes and mouths while undulating rivers of Cross and Odenkirk’s heads flow by in the foreground and background.
Just like in the old days, organized religion and idiotic commercials are two of W/Bob and David’s biggest targets; in one sketch, a parent urges her child to stop talking about God as “some all-forgiving monster.” A courtroom TV show that has to replace a “no-nonsense” judge with a “some-nonsense” judge (before finally bringing in an “all-nonsense” judge) is one of several sketches as thorough and funny as the best Mr. Show bits. Not everything works; the behind-the-scenes look at a musical about a singing house is one of a handful of tough slogs. Throughout it all, Odenkirk proves a far nimbler, gentler, more sympathetic performer than Cross, who used to steal scenes with ease but now exudes an immobile surliness more often than he used to.
If you knew about this unlikely act TV necromancy before now, then chances are you’ve already scarfed it down. But if you aren’t sure whether it’s your thing, go find Rap: The Musical and the Lie Detector sketch online and see where they take you.
