Alex Takats, left; and Carl Juste
MOVIE REVIEW
Endangered (2022)
“Endangered” follows four journalists of the liberal press going about their trade in four geographically separate but equally unsettled parts of the world, running into all the dangers that the trade has always encountered plus the ones brewed up in our current tense period. Dire as these are, sometimes they don’t seem so novel. Governments have always threatened reporters and the cops have always fired tear gas at them and people who mark their ballots in a different place have always been angry. When the film arrives at its natural destination with the Jan. 6, 2021, Washington riot and the abuse of journalists there, it seems one item on a continuum rather than a rogue data point. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s HBO film puts its journalists on another continuum, the honorable one leading back to The Washington Post and Watergate, and further back to clips from a 1960s U.S. TV program about the strength of a free press and the roaring print lines churning it out. Whether this is a road map to rescue or a last lament is less clear.