Movie Review: ‘The Post’
Show up for a story of heroic journalism—stay for the story of a heroic woman
Katherine “Kay” Graham (Meryl Streep) was a woman thrust into a position that she was never prepared for; admittedly she had never held a job in her life. She was a wife, mother, socialite, and heiress — she threw the best parties in Washington DC. All that changed in 1963, after the suicide of her husband Philip Graham, then publisher of The Washington Post. Her father had passed down that title and the paper to his son-in-law in 1946; Kay never felt slighted by this. She was happy in her own life and never had pictured herself with
an important job at her father’s paper, well that is until fatefully she became
its publisher.
“The Post” is the latest in a recent string of historical drama (“Lincoln” and “Bridge of Spies”) from renowned director, Steven Spielberg. Reportedly, this whirlwind of a production was completed in a paltry seven months, a somewhat surprising schedule considering the caliber of the talent involved. The production’s pace is matched in turn by the pace of movie as well as the equally brisk dialogue of the screenplay by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer. Possibly all purposeful moves on Spielberg’s part to accentuate the urgency
of the times and of the newspaper business itself.
The movie tells the story of the release of the Pentagon Papers, details of which were first published by The New York Times — who was then put under a restraining order and barred from further publishing anything more about the papers — and then subsequently by The Washington Post. The Nixon administration took both newspapers to the Supreme Court in order to settle whether they were unlawfully publishing classified state secrets. The papers themselves had been taken, copied, then disseminated by one of the participants in the initial report itself, Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). Ellsberg himself had traveled to Vietnam in 1966 to assess the war effort and the effects of the U.S.’ additional commitments, only to find surprising sameness; the increases in troop levels and commitments were producing no results. For decades, one administration after another and most notably the architect of the war effort and the commissioner of the original report, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), covered up the truth of the matter in order to save face for their failures.
In 1971, on the verge of an IPO — an attempt to stave off financially difficulties and compete with large newspapers with a further reach like The New York Times — Kay Graham has the difficult task of managing her board’s expectations, quelling the fears of the investors, and all while maintaining the journalistic integrity of the newspaper. Then, of course, at that crucial point Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) comes to her with a story of such importance that both the eyes and the fury of Nixon’s White House were upon it. Once again, Kay Graham is thrust into a position that she is unprepared for.
Ben Bradlee was itching to get his hands on the Pentagon Papers and now he has them — all of them. Having already been scoped in his own backyard by The Times, Bradlee pushes his team just within the bound of the law to exhausted all possible leads, including a little subterfuge at The Times’ offices. As it turns out a connection to the papers was in their office all along, reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) whom had work alongside Ellsberg at the Rand Corporation years back. With The Times unable to publish, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity but not without consequences. You know, little things like incarceration or the end of The Washington Post.
Kay Graham now had a difficult choice to make: to share what could have been the biggest story of that time — how the U.S. government knew the Vietnam War was unwinnable and continued to fight it anyway — or to bow
to the pressure of her board and investors or, more importantly, the Nixon
White House.
I don’t think the prescience of “The Post” is lost on anyone. More than one review has pointed out how the current and almost daily assault on the idea
of the free press mirrors the happenings of current administration so I won’t delve to deeply into that here. What I was surprised by is how much this
film is about the changing gender politics of the era; this could also be just
as prescient.
Spielberg is a master filmmaker and he only continues his mastery here but also his propensity to “gild the lilly” as it were, lacking the deftness to deliver this film’s messages in more of an understated or inherently understood manner. It’s also the reason why we love his movies; that bright-n-shiny optimism that the heroes and the righteous will always win the day. Streep and Hanks are equally up to the task as well as the “murderers’ row” of a cast assembled around them: Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, Tracy Letts, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, Jesse Plemons, and Michael Stuhlbarg.
The movie also contains some of the most lovingly shot scenes of offset printing and typesetting ever seen before on screen (sorry, my background
is in graphic design).
