RELEVANT TODAY

N 1971, Katharine Graham had been running The Washington Post Company for eight years, having assumed control when her husband, Philip, took his own life in 1963. Painfully shy and prone to chronic self-doubt, she was an uneasy corporate leader and an unlikely feminist pioneer. Some were sceptical when, a few years earlier, she had hired Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, Ben Bradlee, to become executive editor of the paper.

Although the two enjoyed a warm working relationship, it would be thrown into a crucible in 1971 with the publication of the Pentagon Papers after the New York Times, which first broke the story, had been ordered to cease doing so by a court injunction. That bravado that would send

The Post into an epic legal and

Iexistential battle just as Graham was preparing to take her family’s media company public – a deal that could easily be scuttled by her potential imprisonment and a Supreme Court fight and Richard Nixon’s vindictive administration.

Those tense couple of weeks in June form the spine of The Post, a stirring, thoroughly entertaining movie in which Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks play Graham and Bradlee with just the right balance of modesty, gusto and expertly deployed star power. Directed by Steven Spielberg,

The Post canters along with crisp pacing and unfussy clarity, its two icons-playing-icons bolstered by a superb cast of supporting players.

It’s Graham’s transformation from insecure daughter and wife to journalist in her own right that gives The Post its narrative drive and poignancy. Hanks is just as sympathetic in his depiction of Bradlee, a performance loomed over by Jason Robards’ Oscarwinning turn in All the President’s Men, about Watergate. If Hanks doesn’t bring Robards’ macho sex appeal to his depiction of Bradlee, he makes up for it in an authenticity that feels lived-in.

The Post works on many levels, from polemic and thinly veiled cautionary tale to fun period piece and rip-roaring newspaper yarn. But at its most gratifying, it’s a love story, from the lede to the kicker. – The Washington Post

CO-STARS: Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, working together for the first time, in The Post.