Film review: The Post  | Daily Mail Online

Three film greats unite for the first time for this sharply dressed, timely newsroom drama, writes Pippa Bailey

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep star as newsroom big-shots Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham

Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep: three titans of film so lauded that the poster for, well, The Post features only the surnames of its leading actors. With a list of names like that, you expect a certain calibre, and The Post doesn’t disappoint. This a sharply dressed and stirring film – a gorgeous 70s vignette of wood-paneled boardrooms, frantic typewriters and smoking in lifts – with the kind of performances that appear completely effortless.

It’s 1971 and the US has been increasingly embroiled in the war in Vietnam for 16 years. A disillusioned former military analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, sends the top-secret pages of a government study detailing, among other things, that the government has deceived the American public about the futility of the war (a conflict that by its end had cost 58,000 American lives) to the The Times. But when an injunction from the White House prevents the paper from publishing the full story, the race is on for The Washington Post to get its hands on the document and prove its mettle. Ultimately the decision as to whether to publish could lead to the financial ruin of the paper and land its key players in prison.

The person tasked with this unenviable choice is Streep’s Kay Graham, the US’s first female newspaper publisher, landed with her position by the suicide of her husband. It is a role – we are told by the way she knocks over a chair in a restaurant with her overstuffed briefcase and nervously clutches at her glasses throughout – for which she feels unprepared. In a world in which women retire to the drawing room after dinner and make sandwiches for the busy men, Kay’s story is equally about holding her own against the condescension of the grey-suited, middle-aged men that surround her as about taking on the government. Relatably, she spends as much of the film in a tizzy of self-doubt as she does leading with courage and clarity. The moment around which the plot turns, when Kay decides to publish the papers (history, here, is the ultimate spoiler), is a charmingly on-the-spot, dithering decision that has a touch of ‘quickly before I change my mind’ about it.

The film charts The Washington Post's decision about whether to publish the revealing Pentagon Papers

The film charts The Washington Post‘s decision about whether to publish the revealing Pentagon Papers

Hanks joins the fray as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, by contrast a slightly irascible, impatient old-boy journalist who spends a lot of time with his arms crossed and will fight to the end to protect the noble free press, consequences be damned. Streep and Hanks have five Oscar wins and a further 20 nominations between them, and yet somehow this is the first time they have shared the big screen. The pair inhabit their roles with ease; neither performance appears a stretch, but both are certainly a joy. 

And yet one of The Post’s most rousing scenes doesn’t involve either: I defy anyone not to get goosebumps as the printing presses roll out thousands of front pages in direct defiance of the government. From opening in a battery of bullets in Vietnam to the flurries of paper and multiple nearly-getting-hit-by-a-car-because-I’m-in-a-rush scenes of the US, Spielberg keeps up the pace, not allowing the film to breathe out until the final five minutes. The camera doesn’t settle in one place for long and favours wide angles that at times feel dizzying. This is a story with high stakes and an Impending Deadline.

It’s a classic tale of first-amendment rights and government corruption, and a timely one for today. The Washington Post is, after all, the paper that brought down a presidency with Watergate (as documented in the journo-genre great All The President’s Men; indeed its opening scene is cleverly mirrored at the end of The Post). Highly principled and told without a hint of irony, The Post at times a little too right-on; we aren’t so much gently revealed its rousing moral as bashed round the head with it. 

The Post is a gorgeous 70s vignette of wood-paneled boardrooms, frantic typewriters and smoking in lifts

The Post is a gorgeous 70s vignette of wood-paneled boardrooms, frantic typewriters and smoking in lifts

It loses its way slightly, too, in Streep and Hank’s final scene, in which the fluorescent strip lights take on an unlikely romanticised glow and the dialogue slips into cliché (‘Journalism is the first draft of history,’ says Kay), but these are small missteps in an otherwise strong film.

If anything, The Post’s main flaw is that it is exactly what you would expect from a Spielberg x Hanks x Streep project – there are no great surprises here. But then, when what you expect is a expertly crafted, magnificently acted film, that’s high praise indeed.



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