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Courtesy of Amazon Prime, I had the chance to watch two movies I missed during their original release, to wit:
The Post: aka Steven Spielberg does the Pentagon Papers as "The Education of Katherine Graham". It's a well-made movie (duh!) with an excellent cast both in major and minor roles, including Matthew Rhys, evoking missing-The-Americans-pangs in me, as Daniel Ellsberg in a near silent role but with his body language telling so much about what's going on within Ellsberg as he witnesses McNamara going from a private conversation in the plane about how the situation in Vietnam is going from bad to worse to the creepily cheerful optimism once he faces the press outside. I noticed the scriptwriters credited were a woman and a man, and they provided a good emotional arc for Meryl Streep going from endlessly condescended to society hostess to risking it all. Tom Hanks as Ben Bradley is yet another incarnation of the honest American persona (flamboyant news editor variation), though for all that Bradley's stomping around like he's in The Front Page, Hanks' best scene is a quiet, introspectively self critical one. Earlier, he's accused Kay Graham that she's letting her friendship wth McNamara influence her, and she's pointed to his friendship with the Kennedys and the fact he did pull his punches accordingly during the Kennedy administration, which he angrily refuted; now, in the follow up scene, he realises she was right, and that you can either be sincerely friends with a politician, or you can be a good reporter, but you can't possibly be both.
For all the obvious topical relevance of the "government versus press"/"whistleblowers: traitors or true patriots?" scenario - and Spielberg wisely goes less is more with Nixon, keeping him entirely to an angry, ranting voice we hear without seeing his face, we only see the White House - this film feels both eerily like a West Wing episode and deliberately old fashioned, and not just because Spielberg's camera positively drools over ye olde printing machines and their lettering. Also not because it's set in a past era. No, it's the part where everyone in the ensemble is basically idealistic and well intentioned. The opening sequence, introducing Daniel Ellsberg as a military observer getting motivated for his later wistle-blowing, is set in Vietnam, it's brief, it's effective, but it also reminded me how impossible a Vietnam movie from Steven Spielberg - who actually is of that very generation - would be, because it's so counter everything a Spielberg movie stands for. In that brief sequence, we see US soldiers getting shot in the jungle, and later much of the indignation of our heroes centres on the Pentagon Papers proving that various US administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, escalated the US presence in Vietnam without admitting they were doing it and despite early on realising this couldn't possibly end well kept continuing the war to avoid the humiliation of an US defeat. Of course, that's one aspect of the Vietnam war to get indignant about, but you know what's actually missing here? War crimes. Little girls burning in US napalm. (If Spielberg ever was assigned to do a film about the My Lai Massacre, he'd undoubtedly focus it on the lone G.I. testifying to the truth, not on either all the other G.I.s going along with it and being or the Vietnamese dying.)
In The Post, Ben Bradley might be frustrated that the New York Times always has the better scoops and the great reputation and be gleeful when he finally gets the chance to let the Washington Post participate in a major major story once the Time gets slammed with a government injunction, but since this isn't a Billy Wilder script and Ben Bradley is played by Tom Hanks, we don't doubt Bradley's primary motivation isn't beating the competition, it's getting the truth to the public which needs to know. The scene early on at a dinner in which Kay Graham leads the other women to the next room once the men (and only the men) start to discuss politics is devastatingly effective in demonstrating the sexism taking for granted by everyone (also how much Kay has internalized it and needs to overcome it to believe her take on the situation is just as valid), but none of the characters are malicious about said sexism; you just know that once they learn better, they will be better. Of course they won't cling to their privileges, not these basically likeable men.
Now, given the sheer current day awfulness on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't decide wehether I find escape in a Spielbergian world where people might be wavering but will of course to the right thing soothing or frustrating. I mean, I want to be inspired by hope. I do. It's just - let me put it this way. I hear this scriptwriting team was also responsible for the excellent Spotlight, aka the movie about the Boston Globe's investigation into the sexual abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. The Post ends with our heroes triumphing and a winking epilogue in which there's a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. But not to worry, audience, the Post is on the job and Truth Will Prevail. Spotlight ends with a devastating credits sequence listing sexual abuse scandals outside of the Boston area everywhere in the world. Going on, and on. I think I've made my point.
All Is True: aka Kenneth Branagh Does Shakespeare's Retirement, directing and starring as Will, with Judi Dench as Anne, Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton and Ben Elton writing the script. The one part which made me sceptical about this in advance was McKellen, much as I love him, playing Henry Wriothesley, who wasn't just younger than Shakespeare but half a century younger than Sir Ian at this point, but I'm happy to say 'twas all worth it. More on this in a moment. Anyway, Branagh's movies can be somewhat over the top, and the longer trailer was somewhat misleading in that it put the emphasis on comedy. Which this film decidedly is not. (The trailer nearly used up all the funny bits.) What it is: a quiet chamber play that doesn't try to be Shakespearean. Which is a plus. (Making movies about writers that have the writers and their lives resemble their best known characters and plots is what puts me off most fictional takes on Jane Austen, for example.) Ben Elton seems to agree with me - and Neil Gaiman, who in his take on Shakespeare at the very end of Sandman includes a scene between a retired Will and Ben Jonson that makes the same point All Is True makes in two scenes, one between Shakespeare and a visiting Jonson as well. No, if you're a writer, you don't need to have lived through all you're writing about. This is not how writing works.
This being said, of course a movie needs a plot. This one is far more Arthur Miller than Shakespeare, if we're making a dramatist comparison, as returning-to-Stratford Will is confronted by the fact he doesn't really know his estranged family any more, he hasn't really dealt with the loss of his son, and that the way he hasn't dealt with it also means he's been unwilling to see the surviving twin, Judith, for who she really is. Elton's script does a great job of using the few facts we have about Shakespeare's family - Susannah the oldest daughter able married to the Puritan-leaning Dr. John Hall and at one point embroiled in a law suit when a Stratford loudmouth tried to slutshame her, Judtih married rather late (as was her mother) - and coming up with distinct personalities for both sisters, their mother and their husbands. (Though if anyone other than Will emerges as the central focus eventually, it's Judith, in a way that would have pleased Virginia Woolf.) The picture he draws of Stratford as a community also is plausible - Will can't just skip Sunday mass, he'd get fined as was his father, the late John Shakespeare, whose fall from grace from alderman to indebted drunkard remains unforgotten, the Puritans are gaining influence, but aren't just painted as caricatures (Dr. Hall isn't very likeable, but gets a devastating scene showing his sincere commitment to his patients), and the local self important MP is none other than Sir Thomas Lucy of apocrphycal "Will once shot his deer" tale (who delights in snubbing Will and gets himself gloriously snubbed by the visiting Southhampton).
Which brings me to good old Mr. W.H.; btw, the movie does let Will point out to Anne that the sonnets were printed without his consent. McKellen might be many a decade older than Southhampton was at that point, and I'm not fond of Henry Wriothesley to begin with and tend to favour fictional Shakespeare tales where someone else was the Fair Youth, but like I said: all worth it, because the scene between Southhampton and Shakespeare is incredible (with the earlier "Southhampton disses Lucy" just McKellen and the audience having fun), both Branagh and MKelllen on top of their game. It's also the scene that by itself justifies this being a movie about William Shakespeare as opposed to, say, anonymous Elizabethan/Jacobean Dad X coming home to estranged family. It's about aging and love and longing and class and intimacy of various types. In this version, Southhampton is aware of Shakespeare's genius and, no longer young himself, now does look at those sonnets as his immortality - but he's also an aristocrat to the core who when Will finally says he'd hoped his feelings were in some way reciprocated goes "nope, you're a glovemaker's son, I'm an Earl, get real". And yet the scene doesn't end on a rejecting note. Earlier, in what only afterwards strikes you as the acting showcase it was because it's played so lowkey yet intense, Will goes from casual conversation into reciting one of the actual sonnets (and no, not bloody "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", thank you, Ben Elton, for recalling there are a lot of others to choose from) and it becomes a naked love declaration. And at the end of the scene, when he's already half out of the door, Southhampton turns back and recites that same sonnet back at Will, word for word, with since the poem's "I" now is the other party takes on a new meaning. And yes, it's an acting showcase as well, but one that feels entirely natural for how the scene has involved and who these two characters in this version are.
Lastly: a very human Shakespeare, this one, neither the jerk of some depictions (looking at you, Rupert Graves) nor the romantic hero of others (step forward, Joseph Fiennes). I remain moved and impressed by this film.
The Post: aka Steven Spielberg does the Pentagon Papers as "The Education of Katherine Graham". It's a well-made movie (duh!) with an excellent cast both in major and minor roles, including Matthew Rhys, evoking missing-The-Americans-pangs in me, as Daniel Ellsberg in a near silent role but with his body language telling so much about what's going on within Ellsberg as he witnesses McNamara going from a private conversation in the plane about how the situation in Vietnam is going from bad to worse to the creepily cheerful optimism once he faces the press outside. I noticed the scriptwriters credited were a woman and a man, and they provided a good emotional arc for Meryl Streep going from endlessly condescended to society hostess to risking it all. Tom Hanks as Ben Bradley is yet another incarnation of the honest American persona (flamboyant news editor variation), though for all that Bradley's stomping around like he's in The Front Page, Hanks' best scene is a quiet, introspectively self critical one. Earlier, he's accused Kay Graham that she's letting her friendship wth McNamara influence her, and she's pointed to his friendship with the Kennedys and the fact he did pull his punches accordingly during the Kennedy administration, which he angrily refuted; now, in the follow up scene, he realises she was right, and that you can either be sincerely friends with a politician, or you can be a good reporter, but you can't possibly be both.
For all the obvious topical relevance of the "government versus press"/"whistleblowers: traitors or true patriots?" scenario - and Spielberg wisely goes less is more with Nixon, keeping him entirely to an angry, ranting voice we hear without seeing his face, we only see the White House - this film feels both eerily like a West Wing episode and deliberately old fashioned, and not just because Spielberg's camera positively drools over ye olde printing machines and their lettering. Also not because it's set in a past era. No, it's the part where everyone in the ensemble is basically idealistic and well intentioned. The opening sequence, introducing Daniel Ellsberg as a military observer getting motivated for his later wistle-blowing, is set in Vietnam, it's brief, it's effective, but it also reminded me how impossible a Vietnam movie from Steven Spielberg - who actually is of that very generation - would be, because it's so counter everything a Spielberg movie stands for. In that brief sequence, we see US soldiers getting shot in the jungle, and later much of the indignation of our heroes centres on the Pentagon Papers proving that various US administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, escalated the US presence in Vietnam without admitting they were doing it and despite early on realising this couldn't possibly end well kept continuing the war to avoid the humiliation of an US defeat. Of course, that's one aspect of the Vietnam war to get indignant about, but you know what's actually missing here? War crimes. Little girls burning in US napalm. (If Spielberg ever was assigned to do a film about the My Lai Massacre, he'd undoubtedly focus it on the lone G.I. testifying to the truth, not on either all the other G.I.s going along with it and being or the Vietnamese dying.)
In The Post, Ben Bradley might be frustrated that the New York Times always has the better scoops and the great reputation and be gleeful when he finally gets the chance to let the Washington Post participate in a major major story once the Time gets slammed with a government injunction, but since this isn't a Billy Wilder script and Ben Bradley is played by Tom Hanks, we don't doubt Bradley's primary motivation isn't beating the competition, it's getting the truth to the public which needs to know. The scene early on at a dinner in which Kay Graham leads the other women to the next room once the men (and only the men) start to discuss politics is devastatingly effective in demonstrating the sexism taking for granted by everyone (also how much Kay has internalized it and needs to overcome it to believe her take on the situation is just as valid), but none of the characters are malicious about said sexism; you just know that once they learn better, they will be better. Of course they won't cling to their privileges, not these basically likeable men.
Now, given the sheer current day awfulness on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't decide wehether I find escape in a Spielbergian world where people might be wavering but will of course to the right thing soothing or frustrating. I mean, I want to be inspired by hope. I do. It's just - let me put it this way. I hear this scriptwriting team was also responsible for the excellent Spotlight, aka the movie about the Boston Globe's investigation into the sexual abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. The Post ends with our heroes triumphing and a winking epilogue in which there's a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. But not to worry, audience, the Post is on the job and Truth Will Prevail. Spotlight ends with a devastating credits sequence listing sexual abuse scandals outside of the Boston area everywhere in the world. Going on, and on. I think I've made my point.
All Is True: aka Kenneth Branagh Does Shakespeare's Retirement, directing and starring as Will, with Judi Dench as Anne, Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton and Ben Elton writing the script. The one part which made me sceptical about this in advance was McKellen, much as I love him, playing Henry Wriothesley, who wasn't just younger than Shakespeare but half a century younger than Sir Ian at this point, but I'm happy to say 'twas all worth it. More on this in a moment. Anyway, Branagh's movies can be somewhat over the top, and the longer trailer was somewhat misleading in that it put the emphasis on comedy. Which this film decidedly is not. (The trailer nearly used up all the funny bits.) What it is: a quiet chamber play that doesn't try to be Shakespearean. Which is a plus. (Making movies about writers that have the writers and their lives resemble their best known characters and plots is what puts me off most fictional takes on Jane Austen, for example.) Ben Elton seems to agree with me - and Neil Gaiman, who in his take on Shakespeare at the very end of Sandman includes a scene between a retired Will and Ben Jonson that makes the same point All Is True makes in two scenes, one between Shakespeare and a visiting Jonson as well. No, if you're a writer, you don't need to have lived through all you're writing about. This is not how writing works.
This being said, of course a movie needs a plot. This one is far more Arthur Miller than Shakespeare, if we're making a dramatist comparison, as returning-to-Stratford Will is confronted by the fact he doesn't really know his estranged family any more, he hasn't really dealt with the loss of his son, and that the way he hasn't dealt with it also means he's been unwilling to see the surviving twin, Judith, for who she really is. Elton's script does a great job of using the few facts we have about Shakespeare's family - Susannah the oldest daughter able married to the Puritan-leaning Dr. John Hall and at one point embroiled in a law suit when a Stratford loudmouth tried to slutshame her, Judtih married rather late (as was her mother) - and coming up with distinct personalities for both sisters, their mother and their husbands. (Though if anyone other than Will emerges as the central focus eventually, it's Judith, in a way that would have pleased Virginia Woolf.) The picture he draws of Stratford as a community also is plausible - Will can't just skip Sunday mass, he'd get fined as was his father, the late John Shakespeare, whose fall from grace from alderman to indebted drunkard remains unforgotten, the Puritans are gaining influence, but aren't just painted as caricatures (Dr. Hall isn't very likeable, but gets a devastating scene showing his sincere commitment to his patients), and the local self important MP is none other than Sir Thomas Lucy of apocrphycal "Will once shot his deer" tale (who delights in snubbing Will and gets himself gloriously snubbed by the visiting Southhampton).
Which brings me to good old Mr. W.H.; btw, the movie does let Will point out to Anne that the sonnets were printed without his consent. McKellen might be many a decade older than Southhampton was at that point, and I'm not fond of Henry Wriothesley to begin with and tend to favour fictional Shakespeare tales where someone else was the Fair Youth, but like I said: all worth it, because the scene between Southhampton and Shakespeare is incredible (with the earlier "Southhampton disses Lucy" just McKellen and the audience having fun), both Branagh and MKelllen on top of their game. It's also the scene that by itself justifies this being a movie about William Shakespeare as opposed to, say, anonymous Elizabethan/Jacobean Dad X coming home to estranged family. It's about aging and love and longing and class and intimacy of various types. In this version, Southhampton is aware of Shakespeare's genius and, no longer young himself, now does look at those sonnets as his immortality - but he's also an aristocrat to the core who when Will finally says he'd hoped his feelings were in some way reciprocated goes "nope, you're a glovemaker's son, I'm an Earl, get real". And yet the scene doesn't end on a rejecting note. Earlier, in what only afterwards strikes you as the acting showcase it was because it's played so lowkey yet intense, Will goes from casual conversation into reciting one of the actual sonnets (and no, not bloody "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", thank you, Ben Elton, for recalling there are a lot of others to choose from) and it becomes a naked love declaration. And at the end of the scene, when he's already half out of the door, Southhampton turns back and recites that same sonnet back at Will, word for word, with since the poem's "I" now is the other party takes on a new meaning. And yes, it's an acting showcase as well, but one that feels entirely natural for how the scene has involved and who these two characters in this version are.
Lastly: a very human Shakespeare, this one, neither the jerk of some depictions (looking at you, Rupert Graves) nor the romantic hero of others (step forward, Joseph Fiennes). I remain moved and impressed by this film.
