Women in Film: 2018 Best Actress Characters - 2

The Academy Awards are coming up three weeks from today so I’m continuing my look at the five roles nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. If we want to write more/better female roles, it’s interesting to look at ones that have worked this year.

This week let’s look at The Post, written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, a film that tells the story of Kay Graham’s wrestling with whether or not to publish the Pentagon Papers.

I read an article in the New York Times that said, basically, Ha—that movie should be called The Times because we broke that story. And they did. But that’s not what this film was about. The film never argued that The Post broke the story and, in fact, showcased the Times breaking the story and the attempts by The Post to catch up!

No, this is a story about a woman, Kay Graham—it’s her story. And it’s tough with people who really lived. Do we know that everything Kay Graham did/said in the film really happened exactly that way? Of course not. Having written biopics I know that one must fictionalize—after all, how could you know what Graham said to her editor in the privacy of an office unless one of them recorded the conversation and you heard the tape? So when talking about a person who really lived, you’re really just talking about the character of that person, as presented in the film.

So who was Kay Graham? She was a socialite whose father bought The Washington Post after the Depression and let Kay’s husband take over the paper in 1946. When her husband committed suicide in 1963, Kay had a choice—sell it or try to run it herself. Many feared she would sell, after all, she wasn’t a working woman. But she jumped in and before long was faced with the Pentagon Papers crisis.

The film shows how nervous she was in this role running the paper, how questioning she was of herself and her ability to do this. We might think, what’s her problem? She’s wealthy, has everything she could want, why’s she so tentative, so unsure of herself?

And the answers to those questions make her the interesting character that she is. You can have all the money in the world but you can’t necessarily play the piano—being wealthy doesn’t guarantee success in doing something. Kay Graham knew that, she was smart enough to realize her limits and worried that she’d do something wrong. After all, the paper was her family’s legacy and she didn’t want to screw it up.

In the end this is a story about a woman who—risking everything when it came to the future of the paper—did the right thing, the courageous thing. But it’s also the story of a woman who came to realize that she was far more capable of courage than she’d imagined. She was a woman who realized that lives often have second acts—and in this film she was just beginning hers.

I’d love to see more films of great women who really did something! Here’s hoping…

Copyright © Diane Lake

11Feb18

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