This space can be whatever I want it to be, and tonight, I want it to be a movie review. From the first preview I saw of The Post, I knew I wanted to see it. The closer it came to premiering, the more desperate I became. For the last two weeks, I've been frantic. I'm really not even sure why it was so important for me to see it, but I suspect I can ferret out the source my interest. I haven't ever been a scholar of the Vietnam war, and I didn't have any deep understanding of what the Pentagon Papers were until a few years ago. I can't even say I was an avid reader of the Washington Post until last year. But with the current geopolitical climate keeping me transfixed, with my unwavering attention to every shred of legitimate reporting I can grasp, I am finding a burgeoning fascination with the wild days of the early 1970s, with what feels to me like the heyday of investigative journalism.
I didn't know what to expect of the characters in the movie. Kay Graham was much more timid than I thought she would be. I assumed that as a woman who had been the publisher of a major newspaper for nearly a decade by the time the movie is set, that she would have been quite confident in her authority, but she was not. There were a lot of moments when she quavered, appeared to have lost her voice, and caved to the overbearing men surrounding her. It made for tense moments for me watching, when I kept hoping that she would reveal a spine of steel, and time after time she showed a willingness to demur. It wasn't until the end that she finally surprised everyone assembled, herself included, when she made a monumental decision and stuck with it, regardless of the potential consequences. At the end, when they are leaving the Supreme Court, I noticed the filmmakers walked Meryl Streep (as Kay) down through a crowd on the courthouse stairs, and nearly everyone she walked past was a woman watching her with keen interest and approval. How few strong female role models there had been up until that point in 1971-2, that someone like Kay who had been insecure most of her life had to be her own role model for what a woman CEO and publisher acted like.
I found the story as told quite compelling. Even though I have learned more about the release of the Pentagon Papers in the last year, I still didn't have the full idea of what went into acquiring and printing them. I had to take myself out of the modern world, with surveillance cameras and cell phones and other digital communication, to see how this all could come together. Even knowing it succeeded, I was tied in knots waiting for the protagonists to be searched, scanned, or caught on video. By the end of the movie I was openly chuckling as it transitioned from the Pentagon Papers into the foreshadowing of the Watergate Scandal.
And I don't know what it is about period dramas, but I find myself distracted through nearly all of them that are set during the last century, especially those that take place during my childhood or right before it. I watched for set decorations and props that were things I would have used or touched. I pay attention to chairs, desks, phones, boxes, toys, typewriters, cars... anything that seems familiar to me from long ago. The most exquisitely distracting part is the costuming. There I was, transfixed to Meryl Streep in shirtdresses and big hair that made her look like Margaret Thatcher, or in an embroidered caftan that made her look twice her size but undeniably old-monied. After ten years of total burnout from clothing design, and another ten to slowly convince myself I should keep trying my hand at it, I find myself missing making clothes more than ever. I'm desperately out of practice, as my nearly-finished cosplay that I wore Thursday proved to me, but movies like today make me want to get good again. All it took was Meryl Streep looking frumpy and conservative in early 70s chic.
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