Big guns boost Post pedigree
THE POST
Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Bob Odenkirk Knowledge is power. But who controls the on/off switch?
IF pure cinematic pedigree counts for anything these days, The Post just has to be the best-bred movie to happen along in a long time.
Front and centre you have two of the finest lead actors in mainstream Hollywood: Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.
As you would expect, both are in wonderful form.
Further boosting The Post’s gilt-edged prospects is Steven Spielberg, the most successful filmmaker in motion-picture history, in the director’s chair.
And Spielberg has responded with one of the finest works of this “final” phase of his long career.
Though The Post is set largely in the early 1970s, its core concerns about the lengths a government will take to lie to the public — and the measures the media should take to preserve and propagate the truth — could not be any more contemporary.
A long and inspiring story begins with Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), a veteran military analyst who covertly distributes a top-secret report that proves the US’s military interventions in far-flung locales such as Vietnam have been a catastrophic failure.
The report came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and US President Richard Nixon and his stalwart Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) used all powers at their disposal to stop its contents reaching US citizens.
The New York Times broke news of the devastating expose before courts threatened it with treason under the Espionage Act.
However, all the heavy lifting required to drag the Pentagon Papers into the spotlight fell to what was then a much smaller media outlet, The Washington Post.
In 1971, the paper hardly seemed up to the onerous task set down by managing editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks).
The Post’s staff were willing to give it a crack, but the final say on whether to print or suppress fell to inexperienced publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep). Having taken on her position in tragic circumstances, Graham had a number of good business reasons to let the story die.
Slowly but surely she answers the call of her conscience, becoming the face of a defiant stand that has become legendary in the annals of investigative journalism.