There is almost nothing that can cheapen and shrink a major moment of national history like a mediocre made-for-TV movie. And The Pentagon Papers, which purports to tell how and why former Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked secret documents on the Vietnam War in 1971, is a mediocre made-for-TV movie.
The primary problem is that director Rod Holcomb (The Education of Max Bickford) gives us pastiche instead of a film with a unified artistic vision and compelling emotional arc. Holcomb imitates the visual styles of several great feature films and then cobbles them together into a relatively lifeless television movie. It is intermittently interesting to look at, but leaves one cold and a bit confused as to what it all means.
James Spader's inner-directed, understated and remote performance as Ellsberg doesn't help matters either. The Pentagon Papers and Ellsberg deserve better and bigger treatment even on the small screen.
For those not familiar with the real event upon which the movie is based, it might help to think of Ellsberg as a government whistle-blower. Only this was one big whistle blown in 1971 in the face of a Richard Nixon White House, which seemed perfectly willing to dismantle the Constitution civil liberty by civil liberty if that's what it took to keep some of its nastier secrets and crimes from seeing the light of day.
Ellsberg copied and then handed to the New York Times 7,000 pages from a top-secret Department of Defense document that chronicled three decades of America's failure in Southeast Asia. The document suggested that any further commitment to the war was a mistake - at the very time that Nixon and Henry Kissinger were expanding the air campaign in the region beyond Vietnam's borders.
On June 13, 1971, reporter Neil Sheehan's first article on the secret documents appeared in the Times. Two days later, the administration won a restraining order in the courts against the Times. The injunction, which was extended to include the Washington Post after Ellsberg also gave the documents to that newspaper, literally stopped the presses.
It took a landmark Supreme Court ruling on June 30, 1971, to lift the injunction and allow the press to print stories based on the documents provided by Ellsberg. The consensus among media scholars is that the Pentagon Papers ruling is the most important decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court on freedom of the press.
