Bruce Greenwood – Memphis Flyer

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.

Behold the gaunt, bony, rodent-like face of Ethan Hawke, who often spackles his strongest performances with the feints and dodges of a scared, reluctant rule-breaker too dim-witted to completely cover his tracks. Hawke’s distracted, sad shiftiness — which makes it seem as though he’s trying (and failing) to pull one over on you — serves him well in Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill, a crisp, smart, talky film about the escalating absurdities of the ruthless, endless war on terror.

Although Good Kill is set in 2010, its hand-wringing over combat ethics and shell-shock remain current. Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan, a middle-aged Air Force pilot whose latest tour of duty is part flight simulation and part desk-jockey drudgery. From inside a cramped, windowless mobile bunker on a military base not far from his suburban Las Vegas home, Egan and his fellow airmen sit at their computers and watch live UVA (unmanned aerial vehicle) video footage of potential targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Whenever Egan and company are given the order to strike, they abstract their actions and its destructive consequences by repeating a grim mantra: “Missiles away. Time of flight: 10 seconds.” They are then rewarded with footage of faraway people, places, and buildings blowing up.

It’s clear that the job is getting to Egan; the coals in his backyard grill at night remind him of the fiery destruction he helped unleash during the day. Plus, he no longer feels like a soldier — he misses the “fear” of actual manned flight. His drinking is getting worse, his relationship with his wife Molly (January Jones) is falling apart, and he can’t seem to explain to himself why he’s following the orders he’s being given.

Egan’s dilemma is not lost on Lieutenant Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), his superior and occasional confidant.

In contrast to Hawke’s hoarse underplaying, Greenwood imbues his weary philosopher-coach role with swagger and gusto. He gets to curse and rage at new recruits while standing in front of a giant American flag, and he also gets some of the film’s most self-consciously aphoristic dialogue: “Drones aren’t going anywhere. They’re going everywhere.” Although Johns is too on the nose a bit too often about the subtle catch-22s of the new war technology, his willingness to think about the paradoxes of his job seem visionary when contrasted with the devastatingly cruel orders given in perfectly scrubbed English by a CIA member (Peter Coyote, literally phoning it in) whose directives push Johns, Egan and others into grayer, darker moral corners.

Niccol keeps his ideas about war in the foreground while the suspenseful action unfolding on the monitors remains chillingly remote and abstract. The drone strikes and explosions are both devastating and completely silent, and there’s some artsy stylistic rhymes thrown in, too: Through Niccol’s use of extremely high-angle establishing shots for both rural villages and suburban backyards, the parallels between Vegas and Afghanistan grow more obvious. People may live and work in these places, but the eye in the sky sees no meaningful distinctions.

Good Kill
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