THE STORY – Traces the explosive career of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
THE CAST – Seymour Hersh
THE TEAM – Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus (Directors)
THE RUNNING TIME – 117 Minutes
Laura Poitras isn’t afraid of a hot-button issue. Her previous documentaries have covered topics as sensitive as Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on NSA spying (the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour”) and Nan Goldin’s righteous crusade against the Sackler family (the incredible “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival). With her latest film “Cover-Up” – co-directed by Mark Obenhaus – Poitras has found a subject who’s as willing to uncover potential controversy and scandal as she is. The documentary examines the life and career of the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. The film serves as essentially a highlight reel of his most important (and infamous) pieces. Using both archival material and contemporary interviews conducted by the filmmakers with Hersh himself, “Cover-Up” is a passionate and powerful tribute to the importance of classic journalism, serving as a poignant reminder of how essential it is to maintain a free society.
Hersh came to fame for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the My Lai massacre and its subsequent cover-up at the height of the Vietnam War in 1969. But before that, he was just another child of immigrant parents living a life of low expectations and aspirations. Upon inadvertently entering the world of journalism, his charm and apparent lack of hesitation or fear helped him succeed in his unplanned and unlikely career.
One thing that has remained true about Hersh across his past half-century of work is that he clearly knows how to adapt. Whether that’s altering his approach to relate to an interview subject or source, or changing with the times to best reach a contemporary audience (as the film shows, he moved into writing more salacious non-fiction books in the 90s, and today he publishes a Substack newsletter), Hersh refuses to settle or become complacent. This energy is exactly what helped him stand out in the first place – his big break came after he grew tired of the standardized methods of incurious fellow reporters at the Pentagon and started to follow leads on his own.
Hersh’s career is linearly relayed by the film in a way that makes him seem like the Forrest Gump of investigative journalism. Besides breaking the story on the My Lai massacre, he also covered Watergate, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Poitras and Obenhaus allow Hersh to recap these career milestones in his own words, very rarely interjecting or asking him questions in the finished film. In these interviews, Hersh is shown to be hyper-expressive, unafraid to mince words or express his own opinions on the acts and misdeeds that he otherwise reported on in an unbiased fashion. He’s a fantastic central figure for a documentary, as captivating and exciting to watch as any fictional character.
As Poitras is wont to do, “Cover-Up” takes the opportunity to impressively tie the past to the present. In small departures from the retrospective fashion of the film, Hersh is shown taking calls from a source in Gaza, working to report on the atrocities being committed there to this very day. It’s not hard to see what the film is going for here: there’s a clear throughline from My Lai to Abu Ghraib to Gaza, and the common denominator is America’s habit of either overlooking or outright encouraging appalling military action in the name of the “greater good” – the supposed safety and security of American citizens. With his reporting, Hersh willingly and intentionally plows through the veil of patriotic ignorance that the American government hopes its inhabitants will unquestioningly hide behind.
While the chapters of Hersh’s life as a journalist are all grimly fascinating in their own way, the film becomes a bit repetitive in how it consecutively delves into each of them. “Cover-Up” is just a bit longer than it perhaps needs to be, and the middle section has a severe dip in energy. The film could have made the tough choice to excise a few of its chapters in the name of focusing more intensely and specifically on the most important sections of Hersh’s work.
But thanks to Hersh’s casual spirit and magnetism, “Cover-Up” is an overall captivating, invigorating watch. Without editorializing too obviously, Poitras and Obenhaus have created an incredibly impactful and, at times, infuriating look at America’s history of violent imperfection, showing that when it comes to holding our nation accountable, journalists like Seymour Hersh are an absolute necessity.
