Nosh 95: 'The Post', 'All the Money in the World'

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Post, All the Money in the World     

This week, two brave women are caught up in power, money and high-level intrigue:

The Post

The Watergate press marvel All the President’s Men (1976) came out just two years after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. But the 1971 Pentagon Papers crisis, a year before the Watergate break-in, elevated the Washington Post from becalmed mediocrity and laid the foundation for its brave zeal to pursue Nixon almost solo, during Watergate’s early months. That tale has waited 46 years for The Post. The “loser” is again the New York Times, which barely factored in the Watergate film, and now sees The Post celebrate its old adversary right in the title. Although the Times first printed Pentagon Papers revelations, a court order soon blocked continuance and the upstart D.C. paper seized the laurel, crowned by the Supreme Court (pro-paper vote: 6-3).

Steven Spielberg’s film has surefire ’70s trappings and the brusque energy of a big paper in that era (almost steam-punky now: typewriters, rotary phones, pneumatic tubes, linotype machines). Quite a gift for those of us with old ink in the blood. Most people never read the secret, voluminous Pentagon reports that anti-war Daniel Ellsberg stole and released, exposing strategic lies during the Vietnam War. They got the gist from newspapers and TV. Spielberg craftily puts us inside the journalism, though without the gnawing suspense of All the President’s Men. Tom Hanks bunkers into growly-voiced ramrod Ben Bradlee, top Post editor. He never quite equals Jason Robards, Oscar’d for his ’76 Bradlee. More than Robards, he frets about his close friendship with JFK (the movie doesn’t mention Bradlee’s old CIA connections).

Jane Alexander carried a shy, nervous, feminist torch in the older movie, but Spielberg makes his torch a subtle bonfire: Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham, canny but nervous, living in the tragic shadow of her late, brilliant husband, Phil. The bouffant-haired press baroness is often cornered by male editors, lawyers and corporate wheels, and “Kay” is A-OK with her Georgetown supper parties splitting along genteel gender lines after dining. Among the smart touches is a deep shot of Mrs. Bradlee (Sarah Paulson) alone in her kitchen, dish towel in hand, listening intently as Kay Graham confers with her men. Streep distills and projects  the fretful feminism and pressured grace which turned a rather porcelain heiress into a steely, gut-hunch publisher.    

Clearly the film resonates in the era of press-hating Trump, who will someday get his own movie (may I suggest All the President’s Lies?). Overall The Post is a little facile, with rolled-out lessons in law, courage, press rights, gender progress and Nixonian paranoia. Patented Spielberg tactics include Bradlee’s cute daughter selling lemonade to harried newsmen. There is sly dialog foreshadowing the future Watergate storm, but at the end Spielberg chooses to spell it out very clearly. Nixon’s special era has certainly had its due on film. The Post is another stake in the dark heart of Dick.        

All the Money in the World

Director Ridley Scott spent heaps of money on All the Money in the World. It feels like a cable channel special flaunting an A-budget pedigree. Rome is used well, if not at La Dolce Vita or Great Beauty levels. Ruins of the Imperial Forum were shot in a ghostly light, maybe because (says the movie) oil billionaire J. Paul Getty felt he had once lived there as an emperor. Getty certainly had imperial tastes, building a huge Malibu replica of a first century villa to house most of his Greco-Roman collection. Another hilltop museum, with the aura of a shopping mall Acropolis, came after his death (his money refused to die).

The film is a sandwich. The top bread is a “bad old rich guy” story about Getty refusing for months in 1973 to pay a fat but shrinking ransom for his grandson JPG III, kidnapped by Italian radicals and then mobsters. The downside bread is a “poor little rich boy” story, about teen John Paul (appealing Charlie Plummer) in primal hell. During cruel negotiations he is mutilated (right ear severed). Stuck between the bread is not the lad’s father, JPG II (Andrew Buchan), a drugged shell of a man. No, the meaty heart is Michelle Williams as the abducted boy’s mom, Gail. Always wary of Getty Sr., she soon realizes that the money king is Scrooge McSuck, a cold, miserly conniver obsessed with deal-squeezing and tax evasion. Williams achieves a chemical bond of maternal agony and white-knuckled rage at brutal wealth. An ace touch is that, as her will hardens, her speech becomes more manorial, crusty with hauteur.

All the Money had a publicity earthquake when sexual scandal outed and ousted Kevin Spacey, who had finished playing the elder Getty. Old (87) trouper Christopher Plummer stepped in, infallibly. Having portrayed a Vanderbilt, Tolstoy, Kipling, Atahualpa, Nabokov, Scrooge, FDR, Aristotle, Mike Wallace, John Barrymore and even a guy named Shitty, he blithely nails down Getty as a fossil-faced creep, an art enthusiast and people wrecker (he loves a painted baby Jesus more than his own family). Italy, Plummer, Williams, Mark Wahlberg as a Getty fixer, even echoes of Citizen Kane, keep this deeply sad, effectively tabloid show involving. On TV it will look just as expendably expensive.    

SALAD (A List)

20 Impressive Portrayals of Rich People, in order of arrival:  

Walter Huston as Sam Dodsworth, Dodsworth (1936); Marcel Dalio as the marquis, Rules of the Game (1939); Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord, The Philadelphia Story (1940); Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Kane (1941); Joseph Cotten as Eugene Morgan, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); Robert Ryan as Smith Ohlrig, Caught (1949); Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard (1950); Orson Welles as Grigori Arkadin, Mr. Arkadin (1955); James Dean as Jett Rink, Giant (1956); Burl Ives as Big Daddy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1957; Burt Lancaster as Prince Salina, The Leopard (1963); Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, The Godfather (1972); John Huston as Noah Cross, Chinatown (1974); Anthony Quinn as Aristotle Onassis, The Greek Tycoon (1978); Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987); Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bulow, Reversal of Fortune (1990); Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, The Aviator (2004); Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, The Queen (2006); Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, There Will Be Blood (2007); Tommy Lee Jones as Gene McClary, The Company Men (2010), and Warren Beatty as Howard Hughes, Rules Don’t Apply (2016).                        

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

If he is not now remembered for Hamlet, that’s because Orson Welles played the prince at 21 – on radio. The script was “Orson’s first full-length script to be broadcast. He even oversaw the publicity, promising an ‘intimacy of interpretation not possible in stage productions.’ His voice, as radio scholar Bernice W. Kliman wrote, was ‘a remarkable instrument evoking visualization as well as clarifying (his) interpretative choices,’ his whispered asides suggesting ‘interiority or complicity with the audience’.” (Quotes from Patrick McGilligan’s engrossing Young Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The gay specter of possible outing haunted Anthony Perkins for most of his life: “A cruiser since puberty, Tony used studio starlets to beard his affair with Tab Hunter, even as that milkshake Adonis was being tattle-trashed by Confidential magazine. He risked exposure by living near Hunter, and when warned by a studio honcho he said, bravely, ‘But I love him.’ Appraising the bisexual Cary Grant, David Thomson provocatively wrote that ‘you could not be a movie star without having the dream love and allegiance of both the main sexual constituencies,’ and those pressures ‘moved a lot of the men and women in movies towards sexual experiment, bisexuality or gayness.” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook or Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Joseph (Anthony Perkins) is harried into hell in The Trial (Astor Pictures, 1962; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Edmond Richard).

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