Disclosure Day

“Disclosure Day” begins in media res with a point-of-view shot of a professional wrestler in the ring getting a boot to the face. It’s quite the wakeup call, dropping us directly into 79-year-old director Steven Spielberg’s 37th feature film with nary a warning and foreshadowing a sci fi-thriller that never takes a moment to let us get our bearings, just as some of its key characters never really have time to get their bearings, and then never really stops going, virtually two hours and twenty-five minutes of rising action in which the concluding line functions as the climax. That line, though, taken in tandem with the opening shot also suggests a wakeup call as a sort of Spielbergian version of Wake Up, Sheeple! There’s an alien conspiracy theory at the heart of David Koepp’s screenplay, true, but Spielberg has never really been about rolling in the mud where most conspiracy theories reside and more about lifting us up. “Disclosure Day” does not suggest that the truth is out there so much as the truth in here, in you and me, in all of us, and has been for a long time, as if he has ineffably transmuted the long-buried alien tripods of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” into dormant machines, to quote the esteemed Roger Ebert, for generating empathy. 

The truth is inside Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert for a nefarious corporation in cahoots with the department of defense called Wardex, who absconds with numerous computer files demonstrating not just the existence of extra-terrestrial life but a 79-year cover-up. He’s a whistleblower, in other words, aiming to get the files to several other Wardex defectors, including Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is adamant about broadcasting the images rather than uploading them. Kellner, however, is doggedly pursued by Wardex’s CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a creepier version of Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K in “Men in Black” in so much as he contends that mankind can only get on with their happy lives if they don’t know the whole truth. It’s as fascinating question as the one posed by Kellner’s semi-inadvertent co-conspirator and pious girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) about whether the revelation will trigger a societal crisis of faith. “Disclosure Day,” however, is not interested in truly debating these points but rather paying them lip service by lining them up as a few philosophical bowling pins to just knock them right back down.

Like Kellner, Spielberg has already made up his mind, and the filmmaker has always believed in some larger force, not God, necessarily, but a higher belief that something in the cosmos is meant to unify us in the face of our earthly strife. That strife is evoked in “Disclosure Day” through an impending nuclear strike involving North Korea, an idea that Spielberg is content to let linger on the periphery rather than truly foregrounding it. The larger cosmic mystery, meanwhile, takes root both in Daniel’s emergent backstory and how it ties to the emergent backstory of the other main character, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly finds herself endowed with psychic abilities and unwittingly speaking what proves to be alien dialect on live television, drawing the attention of both Wardex and its defectors as Hugo sees her as nothing less than a sign he has been waiting for to tell the world that we are not alone.

Blunt’s performance is a marvel. As written, her character skews broad, a perky weather girl who wants to be taken seriously becoming a spokesperson for the whole universe. In a sense, all the moving parts of Koepp’s screenplay bloom in Margaret and Blunt binds them all together without going over the top, evincing in equal measure fear and a sense of innate responsibility as someone swept along by forces they don’t understand. In that way, she’s an impeccable surrogate for the audience. Her character is trusting that all this will lock into place just as we are trusting that all this will lock into place, and that is how “Disclosure Day” engenders suspense as much as its expertly staged chase sequences. Every time we see Hugo he appears to be on a soundstage with some sort of set being put into place behind him, quietly implanting the idea in the back of our mind that once this set is ready, the final piece of the narrative puzzle will click. 

Hugo’s soundstage and what it ultimately engenders comes with a deeper meaning. “Disclosure Day” does not render its own artifice as explicitly as, say, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” but in gathering all his characters at a soundstage where Hugo functions as nothing less than a director nods at his artifice, nevertheless, while also illustrating his six-decade career as an artist who has always believed in the power of the moving image to unite us. Spielberg might be pulling bits from so many previous movies, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Minority Report,” from “E.T.” to “War of the Worlds,” but the movie that his 37th one most echoes turns out to be the 36th: “The Fabelmans.” “Disclosure Day” is not just Spielberg replaying the hits but drawing together all the themes that have fascinated him his whole career. If the aliens feel almost beside the point by the time the movie ends, it is because they are the vehicle not only for Spielberg’s plea for empathy but a full-fledged act of self-expression. 

The Post

“The Post” begins with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) on the ground in Vietnam listening to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) lament the war’s hopelessness in private only to espouse platitudinous positivity to the press. Determining that America itself is on a need to know basis and needs to know, Ellsberg pilfers top secret documents proving the US Government already knows the war cannot be won and keeps fighting anyway. Though I suspect director Steven Spielberg wants to begin in Vietnam to remind us of what’s at stake, it nevertheless gets a little lost anyway in what follows, with occasional on the nose variations of this being The Right Thing To Do overridden by the film’s emphasis on journalistic integrity, which, I suspect, is why the movie changed its title midway through production from “The Papers” to “The Post.”

In documenting Ellsberg’s thievery, however, much of the film’s prospective journalistic suspense is simultaneously eliminated. The reporters here don’t really hit the pavement to find the scoop; the scoop comes to them. No, the principal drama lies in whether or not The Post will defy the government by publishing The Pentagon Papers, a decision left not to editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) but to The Post’s publisher and “The Post’s” emergent heroine, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep). Not that Bradlee doesn’t have opinions, he very much does, and some of the best sequences in “The Post” simply let Streep and Hanks exist, particularly their characters’ first encounter over breakfast, Spielberg’s camera half-rounding the table and then mostly staying still to watch them interact. The conversation, discussing the direction of the paper, is a nicely written series of verbal counterattacks, though the acting rubber these two titans joyfully burn in one another’s company is the real point, and that joy (for actors and viewers alike) is epitomized in how the scene ends with Streep laughing so hard she almost goes over in the back of her chair.

Their discussion partly involves The Post’s local-only angle which Bradlee seeks to subvert, and watching him grouse about being beaten for scoops by the vaunted New York Times in regards to The Pentagon Papers is a sly reminder how so often journalistic good deeds are born of more selfish interests. But when Tricky Dick decides to take the Times to court over their publishing of Ellsberg’s top secret information, the leaker brings his documents to The Post. Alas, to publish could potentially cripple the paper at the very moment it is about to go public, a meeting of issues that sort of suggests Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline U.S.A.” Of course, he was a man in a man’s world, with a mostly silent wife waiting on the sideline to support him, while Katharine is in charge because her husband died, leaving her alone in a sea of men that vacillate between being respectful and patronizing, like Arthur Parsons (Bradley Whitford), who upon questioning his publisher’s resolve is met with a “Thank you, Arthur, for your frankness” which Streep maximizes for cutting condescension.

This position is evoked not just in Katharine’s plight but in Bradlee’s wife, Tony (Sarah Paulson). If at first you might wonder why a heavy-hitter like Paulson is being relegated to The Supportive Spouse role, a la Amy Ryan in Spielberg’s own “Bridge of Spies”, lingering in the shadows of doorways to encourage her husband, her character is afforded one scorching mid-movie monologue in which she illuminates for her semi-oblivious spouse the significance of Katharine’s mettle, which Paulson delivers with quiet authority as Hanks smartly has his character just stand there and take it.

If “The Post” is blatant in its Right to Publish messaging, really only hearing the government’s case in a one-on-one between Katharine and a craven McNamara, there becomes something inexorably powerful both in Katharine having to navigate a mostly male dominion but also the dominion of D.C. movers and shakers. In this, Bradlee becomes something like Katharine’s conscious, seen most acutely than a shot when he approaches her at a birthday party to sort of call her integrity on the carpet, as he leaves, we see him walking away from some vantage point amidst a crowded room of political moguls, while Katharine is left marooned between the two. The moment is better evocation of these ideas, frankly, than the movie’s more barefaced reminder that the press is meant to “serve the governed, not the governors”, which is a Supreme Court dictum, yes, and also a reminder why Supreme Court Justices are not enlisted to write movie dialogue.

The implementation of that real life line will no doubt lead to plaudits of timeliness, how “The Post” is here to remind us why freedom of the press is so important when it is so often under fire in present-day America. Perhaps that drove Spielberg to make this movie, but pre-production concerns stand apart from aesthetics, like the climactic scene when Katharine must decide whether to sign off on publishing The Papers as she, Bradlee and everyone else communicate by a variety of phones. If it sounds static, it is shot, with a variety of zoom ins and zoom outs from various angles, in the manner of an action scene, bringing home the inherent drama with great flair. And Streep plays this sequence with great flair herself, drawing out these moments with an electrically quivering anxiety. And when she declares “Let’s publish”, it becomes less about anything connected to the present than something extemporaneously rising up from within.

Bridge of Spies

Over the years, Tom Hanks has cultivated an unofficial status as cinema’s spokesman for The Greatest Generation. First, with his Oscar nominated turn as Capt. John Miller in the celebrated “Saving Private Ryan” and then in producing the seminal HBO serial “Band of Brothers”. And so while his casting in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War era tale “Bridge of Spies” might have been inevitable, it is nonetheless impeccable, because all that past Hanks history perfectly informs his role as the real-life Jim Donovan, a WWII vet turned insurance lawyer who agrees to represent a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Donovan is enlisted to provide the appearance of a fair trial but Donovan wants to do this because he truly believes that even a man everyone wants to see hanged is afforded the right to a fair trial.

Hanks can downplay with the best of ‘em, and that modulation is extremely crucial to the all-around success of “Bridge of Spies.” This easily could have devolved into sentimental mush with Donovan flailing his arms and pounding his fists, crying “…And Justice For All!” Instead Hanks outfits his Donovan with an almost incredulous air about the one-sided bureaucracy he repeatedly encounters, as well as a quiet disbelief at so many informal hanging judges surrounding him, from cops to a painfully on-the-nose sequence aboard public transit where everyone stares at Donovan like he’s fugitive Richard Kimble on the el in the Windy City. But Hanks never goes all-in on this public crucible nor does he go all in on playing a crusader. He evinces a genuine attorney, a man who knows politicking is the only way to get things done. The scene when Donovan visits the Judge’s home for a “narrowly legal” discussion finds him using his lawyerly charm to sly effect, rolling around in the mud without disturbing his cufflinks.

Still, Donovan’s worldview is altered, and this is because of his working relationship with Abel. Where everyone else sees a stone cold enemy, Donovan sees a guy. Granted, that guy is written a bit too platitudinous, but Abel’s humanity nonetheless comes through in Rylance’s incredibly restrained performance that gracefully conveys how he views himself not as a hero of his homeland but a man simply enlisted to do a job. In that way, Abel is not unlike Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), an American U2 spy plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union and taken prisoner in a subplot that comes across a bit rushed and broad, as does the side story of Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), a Yale economics student in East Germany who winds up in the hands of the Stasi when they presume his American accent means he’s a spy. Neither Powers nor Pryor have any texture. They are basically just instruments of the plot, existing to provide counterweight to Abel’s plight and to be put in harm’s way so they can be saved. And yet…their very cipher-ish nature is also makes them resonate.

As the story turns, Donovan becomes less a lawyer and more an agent of American espionage, enlisted by the United States government to travel to volatile Berlin, shimmying between West and East, brokering a prisoner exchange, Abel for Powers. And once Donovan discovers that Pryor is also being held, he goes rogue, trying to include this hapless student in the prisoner swap as well. Donovan doesn’t know these men and doesn’t need to know them or who they are to act on their behalf; he just knows it’s the right thing to do.

Taken as a whole, “Bride of Spies” becomes less about the nature of this spy game then this ordinary man turned hero standing up for what’s good about his country even as his country seems to misplace its own principals in the name of keeping itself safe against terrorism. You might wish Spielberg pushed harder at the notion that America was just as mixed up in all this nefariousness as the “bad guys”. But that’s not Spielberg’s style; cinematographic Americana, however, is. Which is why even as Donovan makes his appeal to the Supreme Court, where we all know he doesn’t stand a chance, because this is all a dog & pony show to make it appear as if it isn’t propaganda when it is so obviously is, Spielberg and his cinematographer of usual choice can’t help but illuminate those hallowed halls with beatific lighting, those white floors gleaming, as if it’s all just saints, no sinners.

If the American sequences are often bathed in a radiant, occasionally autumnal, light, scenes set inside East Berlin are more gray and unsparing. A sequence of Donovan making his way alone through the streets to facilitate secret meetings turns an otherwise picturesque snowfall ominous, being robbed of his Saks Fifth Ave overcoat, left to facilitate secret meetings on the other side of that big beautiful wall with a nasty cold. He tells everyone he meets he just wants to go home and get into bed.

He does, sure enough, in a scene that briefly seems like a paean to tranquil domesticity, a reminder that order has been re-sorted, and it seems, briefly, the movie might end there, snug as a blanket. One more shot awaits, however, and Hanks’ reaction, swiftly transforming from contentedness to distress, re-configures everything, tempering a happy ending. The Cold War rages on.

Lincoln

The first few minutes of "Lincoln", taken from Tony Kushner’s screenplay based on the book "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearnes Goodwin, is deft and masterful. At first you worry Steven Spielberg has ripped a page from his own manual by kicking events off with a brutal battle re-enactment, only to move it aside quickly for two black Union soldiers reciting their accomplishments to an unseen face. The shot reverses. The unseen face is President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day Lewis). It tells us that Lincoln is specifically about what he is trying to gain for them.

Two white soldiers approach. They futz around, reciting The Gettysburg Address. One of the black soldiers recites a few of its words too. The words, the movie is saying, have resonated, but now they must be backed up as more than mere rhetoric.

The film takes place in the waning days of the grisly War Between The States. The army of Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris) is advancing on the Confederacy at Wilmington, threatening to force either a peace negotiation or surrender. Jefferson Davis sends three advisors, including his Vice President, northward in hopes of brokering a treaty. President Lincoln, however, has loftier ideals. He yearns to push the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, through the squabbling House of Representatives, and he requires the pretense of war to make it appear as if slavery’s abolishment is the only way to effectuate the war’s end.

"Lincoln", directed in a basic but elegant fashion by Spielberg, forgoes the trappings of the modern biopic by essentially not being a biopic – a re-telling of a whole life – but a chronicling of a key event in that life. By doing so, the essence of the man reveals itself through his decisions, interactions, and the way he goes about attaining equality. To do so he must abstain from playing fair, and willingly employs three skilled connivers (James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson) to cajole opposing Democrats of the Congress to turn coat and vote for the Amendment.

One of the film’s most telling sequences involves a dozen or more African Americans entering the U.S. Capitol Chamber as the people rise and the John Williams’ score dramatically swells, only to have Spader’s character an instant later lift his finger in impersonation of a gun at one of the representatives down below whose vote they demand. It’s a wonderful moment in which Spielberg – intentionally or not – undercuts his own typical pomp, which is sort of the movie as a whole is doing.

In a role that should, by all means, be virtually unplayable, Daniel Day Lewis gives a titanic performance by resisting the enormity of the man’s myth. You can see the coming myth taking shape in the way he commands a room in spite of his unimpressive voice with his grace and dignity, but Lewis seems to suggest that Lincoln either didn’t know or didn’t care about his stature. Frail and graying, endlessly hunched over, his eyes fixed on his shoes more often than the sky, clearly evoking the metaphorical weight of all he carried, he spends much of the film listening to others argue with a weary, amused grin. To show patience as President must require a Herculean effort. 

So too is Lincoln’s personal life mixed in with the political intrigue, the madness of his wife Mary Todd (Sally Field), her worries over how the nation will view the man they love if he pushes for something so controversial, and the anger of his son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who wishes only to join the Union army to prove his self-worth. Rather than feel forced, however, these passages demonstrate the full and tiring nature of the President’s existence, and the way his position calls for nearly eternal conflict.

“Lincoln’s” coda is the only troublesome spot. The presenting of his death, brief as it may be, is the one moment when History Channel-ness creeps into the production, an obligatory recitation of facts as opposed to re-illustrating the film’s themes. I did, on other hand, appreciate the (inevitable) placement of the snippet of the infamous Gettysburg oration. It brings it full circle from the opening, showing that the rhetoric did become reality.

And it is not even the most crucial speech in the film. No, the film’s most crucial speech is less a speech than one of the President’s many folksy parables, told to two nameless men in a telegraph room. Throughout "Lincoln", Honest Abe is sneaky and calculating in obtaining what he desires. His ideology, though, whether he was reciting it for 15,000 people or 2 people, was never in doubt.