[.ca] Pentagon Papers

Pentagon Papers:
I've watched it twice, just to see if my overall appreciation of the film would improve, and it did. It's a stronger, worthier film than I thought. In this film, we see Daniel Ellsberg make two crucial decisions: first, he stops supporting the Viet Nam War as a winnable war after visiting the country itself and being exposed to the real casualties, plus startling on-scene opinion; and then he returns home and gets his influential boss at Rand (played by Alan Arkin) to slip him a copy of some top-secret papers, Classified, that sum up America's involvement in the conflict from day-one. Reading these papers disillusions him, and he wants the papers exposed. No one with political clout will assist him in getting the information out, and David Ellsberg contemplates being a traitor to his country by releasing the papers to the public any way he can. He and his beatnik pal, Russo (played by Paul Giamatti), start making photocopies galore...and Ellsberg even gets his kids--from a broken marriage--to help out, until their mother finds out what is going on. James Spader depicts the growing pains of Daniel Ellsberg with high expertise, coolly making this film about shocking political decisions, yes, but also about a man growing up all over again. Claire Forlani plays the woman he turns to after his divorce, even though, at the start, their views on the Viet Nam War are opposite. She comes to his aid, after abandoning him, when she discovers his epiphany. The two leads are strong together, sneaking around, making plans to funnel the papers to a major newspaper, watching the news to see if Ellsberg will be suspected as the "leak"--and once Ellsberg is in real trouble, we see how loyal Forlani's character--Patricia--can be. Some of the war info squeezed into the script, so we can know what all the fuss is really about while enjoying the human-interest element, does suggest that this film is in some ways merely a surface-treatment of a complex, decades-spanning problem. But that is countered by the fairly successful look at Daniel Ellsberg and his few allies, and what they went through.