When I saw The Post last Friday, it was a fascinating experience before the movie even started. Walking into the mostly full 500 seat theatre during the previews, the reflection of the Mamma Mia 2 trailer on a sea of bald heads and their white-haired counterparts was brighter than the screen itself. I found my customary seat in this theatre I adore \u2013 conveniently, my seat of choice is always empty \u2013 and settled in amongst the 400-or-so people not of my age. I was not surprised by the turnout. Seeing movies among a collection of octogenarians has been an occasional occurrence for me for 15 years now \u2013 this is what happens when you go to a Sunday matinee of Mystic River or a Super Bowl Sunday matinee of Michael Clayton, or a Friday matinee of a Steven Spielberg movie starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. Sometimes, your tastes skew old.<\/p>\n
We all watched The Post together: myself, a smattering of adults with their parents, and a borderline comical number of older couples who seemed pretty excited about this particular movie. And the experience was deeply fun, for all the reasons going to the movies with a lot of people can be fun. It was a Steven Spielberg film, after all, so we knew we would be getting expertly crafted entertainment. We felt the cast would be able to sell some of the hack lines that come from a script co-written by the writer of Spotlight and guided by the man who – despite his staggering career high points – also directed War Horse. The audience was thoroughly entertained as well, and even full on applauded a particularly satisfying moment in the latter half of the film, and then applauded again as the credits rolled. I heard the word \u201cprescient\u201d in three separate conversations as I sat in my seat during the credits, and I was caught in a totally acceptable aisle roadblock caused by a mishap with a walker for a couple minutes after the credits ended. It was a legitimately fantastic experience and it has surely elevated The Post in my mind as time has passed and I continue to think about it.<\/p>\n
When discussing The Post the next day with somebody who had not seen the film, I praised it in the way I had praised Bridge of Spies two years previous. The blocking, I said, was staggering. Everything that has been said about Spielberg as a formalist remains true. In response, my fellow film fan said, \u201cThese are things only you will care about.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is probably true. There are parts of The Post where my attention drifted from the dialogue to the movement of the camera, and the various ways Spielberg can direct the viewer\u2019s attention without the assistance of a cut. In hindsight, these are the things that stick with me about a Spielberg movie: not so much the story itself as the filmmaker\u2019s ability to keep us engrossed in that ongoing story.<\/p>\n
In a recent conversation with director Patty Jenkins for the Directors\u2019 Guild of America podcast, Spielberg said some predictably annoying things, but he mostly said predictably interesting things. Discussing the first scene Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks share in the film \u2013 which was also the first scene the pair shot together \u2013 Spielberg addresses why the scene plays out entirely in the master wide shot, despite the assembly cut being built with elements of the ample coverage Spielberg shot.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I got to the end of the day I realized they were so comfortable with each other,\u201d he told Jenkins, \u201cI said, \u2018this is playing like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, why cut? Why even use any of the coverage?\u2019 So I played that entire scene in the master.\u201d<\/p>\n Watching the film before having heard this discussion, I recall being surprised there were no cuts found in the scene in question. It\u2019s not unlike Spielberg to have a long-ish take in his movie \u2013 he\u2019s famous for them, and there are numerous beautiful examples of them throughout The Post \u2013 but those are usually designed in a more elegant way than they were here. In this particular scene, I was struck by how the camera moved to follow Streep\u2019s entrance as she sits down with Hanks, before the camera settles into a static position next to Hanks. This is where I assume Spielberg always thought he would cut, because – after a pause – the camera dollies back over to Streep\u2019s side of frame. Spielberg never shies away from using intriguing blocking to keep the viewer interested for a longer take, but this was a decidedly non-Spielberg move. It felt like he always intended to come back to the master shot for the move back to Streep, but that the interim would be filled with coverage. It was the type of movement that indicated he always thought this scene would have a more conventional editing structure. Which it did in his head, until he realized he didn\u2019t need it to anymore.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause you know when we cut to a close-up, we\u2019re editorializing,\u201d Spielberg continued. \u201cThe second we make a cut, we\u2019re making a statement. We all know why we\u2019re making the cut, and the audience subliminally is supposed to feel the purpose of the cut, but it\u2019s totally editorializing. And I thought, \u2018why don\u2019t we let the audience do the editorializing? Let them choose who they\u2019re most compelled to listen to and watch the most by not involving coverage.\u2019 And so that was just an example of how I think that scene just cooks better in a three minute sustained master just with the two characters talking than it did when I saw the first cut which was all coverage.\u201d<\/p>\n Disagreeing with Spielberg about the constructions of filmmaking is like disagreeing with Michael Jordan about the effectiveness of fade away midrange jumpers, and as such I will not do that here. Spielberg\u2019s comments on editorializing are exactly correct, but the restraint it takes to hold to that conviction requires a level of confidence most people don\u2019t have (as well as a pair of actors that pretty much everybody likes watching). It\u2019s especially telling that, in making his comparisons to other actors, he compares Streep and Hanks to actors whose heyday came a full half-century ago. He could have simply said, \u201cbecause everybody likes watching Tom Hanks and everybody likes watching Meryl Streep,\u201d and yet he felt it important to invoke the past, because he always does.<\/p>\n![\"post1\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/post1.jpg\")
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