“Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People” – Won’t win the prize [MOVIE REVIEW]
Joseph Pulitzer as painted by John Singer Sargent. “Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People,” directed by Oren Rudavsky and written by Rudavsky and Robert Seidman, was produced in association with PBS American Masters. One had reason to have high hopes. Pulitzer made a major impact on publishing and is the quintessential immigrant story. My formative years were spent reading the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the first newspaper he bought and the only one still bearing the Pulitzer name. Alas, the high hopes were dashed fairly early on. In what is a typical, but fairly annoying pattern, scenes filmed to resemble the past – Pulitzer on his yacht; newsboys running on the street, Pulitzer in various activities filmed to look as they might have at the time – fall flat and add nothing to the story. Add to that the dreadful narrative representation of Pulitzer by Liev Schreiber doing what is supposed to be a Hungarian accent and you lose me every time. It’s not that Schreiber doesn’t do a credible accent, it’s just that it’s so unnecessary and distracting. I doubt very much that there is a record of what Pulitzer sounded like, but I’m willing to bet he didn’t have much of an accent if he had one…
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