The references in the film are to today: it starts at a wrestling match full of MAGA fans, the local Kansas news channel keeps reporting on the escalations of conflict by Russia, there’s an oppressive government-adjacent agency trying to conceal the truth, and the whole revealing to the public of confidential material brings to mind the Epstein files.
In all of this: Daniel “Daney” Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is responsible for leaking these private documents and videos of concealed historic alien footage; the Kansas City network meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who had contact with them, now has supernatural powers and is acting as a surrogate for them; Hugo (Colman Domingo) is the wise director of this “disclosure” movement; Noah (Colin Firth) is the opposition leader that would do anything for this information not to be revealed; and, Jane (Eve Hewson), who is Daney’s girlfriend, a former nun-in-training, is there to experience and both help and hinder in this disclosure project.
In interviews for Disclosure Day, Spielberg brought up two autobiographical anecdotes that I was perhaps unaware of prior: that early on in his career he would have loved to make a James Bond film and how once he crashed an Alfred Hitchcock set, who courtly got him kicked out of it (without even an introduction).
After having seen Dr. No (1962) recently you can clearly see the influence of the 007 franchise on how Spielberg films action scenes (notably the car-chases and the kinetic momentum in these sophistic set-pieces) and for Hitchcock in how he builds suspense, balancing the characters and narrative in a constant mode of action.
But obviously Spielberg is more than just his influences, and you feel the last forty years of his cinema in the background of Disclosure Day through the images and scenes from his previous films that reappear. With the emphasis on surveillance, it recalls Minority Report (2002), and through the power of journalism, The Post (2017).
As if it was a last breath, highlighting the poignancy of previous utterances, repeating them anew and differently, to stress a point.
Post-WWII footage even harkens back to his previous generation models, that he revered, such as George Stevens and Sam Fuller.
A recurrent image in late-Spielberg films is the childhood home. That of being a child in one’s bedroom. The riff is obviously to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and how the astronaut David (Keir Dullea) ends up after a psychedelic episode in this renaissance bedroom. But for Spielberg, it’s the suburban personal space of his youth, a kid’s bedroom. Previously he does it at the end of A.I., Ready Player One (2018) and The Fabelmans (2022).
There’s something both beautiful and mysterious of the gesture. In Disclosure Day, all the while the chase to get Daney and Margaret together, Hugo almost randomly appears like a filmmaker on a set as in an empty Kansas warehouse he’s rebuilding Margaret’s childhood home (where the film will climax).
And this close encounter with a third kind, that both Margaret and Daney need to recall, isn’t that of a sexual trauma (like in Araki’s Mysterious Skin, 2004; and who’s new I Want Your Sex I really want to see), but is more mystic and empathic in nature.
Where someone like Eastwood we’re now discovering is retiring after Juror No. 2 (2024), Spielberg is somehow still persisting. And with Disclosure Day we see how he imagines, if they were real (“I want to believe”), how the acknowledgements of extraterrestrials would be done today, in real-time. Through a unique regional broadcaster and then it’s spreading to all sorts of other channels and international networks. Seeing him play out this challenge is really interesting, I think.
And Spielberg is dropping signs of autobiography. Even though we’re not in the realms of The Fablemans anymore, but in Margaret’s childhood home when there’s a shot of a table with a book on French cooking or in another room a wall of pianos, these are clearly personal cues that are resurfacing.
The French film critic Serge Daney (one correspondence with the Daney name-character of Disclosure Day) talked about his role as a critic as that of a passeur, the French word for that of a transmitter. In Disclosure Day, Daney and Margaret describe their powers as that of being transmitters. Their powers are that of an intense understanding, empathy and communication that goes beyond any reasonable limits.
And that’s a beautiful gift, and it’s one worth cherishing.
Lengthy scenes between Daney and Jane discussing faith, Noah and Hugo discussing humanity disrupt the action, but are fascinating, and are essential at creating a dialogue between two opposing views and for Spielberg to communicate his views on life at this mature time in his life (not since Cosmopolis, 2012, have I found these type of philosophical conversations so well filmed).
The cliché of Spielberg is that he not only sees the best of humanity but also its worst, and that equally his filming can be some of the best and equally the worst.
Perhaps a little unfair, maybe there’s still of that in Disclosure Day, even though I loved it very much.
I don’t really review films anymore, but my love for Disclosure Day inspired me to do so.
