Tom Hanks thrills in Spielberg’s timely newsroom drama
Dir Steven Spielberg Starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Carrie Coon, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie
The man in the White House is mad. In fact, scratch that: he’s furious. From the camera’s vantage point outside in the dark, he seems dwarfed by his office – the tall, oblong windows of the West Wing don’t frame him so much as enclose him, as a jam jar would a toad. But while his stature might be lacking, his wrath is outsize, and as we listen in, he rants about the wayward media in a surly, anxious rasp.
The year is 1971, and the president we’re spying on is Richard Nixon, but put a smartphone in his paw and it could easily be… well, you don’t need me to spell it out. This tremendous new film from Steven Spielberg takes care not to flag up its historical resonance too enthusiastically. But its tale of a US newspaper’s struggle to hold a corrupt administration to account could hardly resonate more with the present moment.
Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-thestory’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive. Yet the two outstanding performances at its core feel like they could have been years in the honing, even though both roles were only cast in March. Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, editor of The
Washington Post, and Meryl Streep is Katharine Graham, the paper’s publisher, whose life on the genteel DC social circuit is worlds away from the newsroom’s clatter and bark.
We learn that Katharine has inherited the Post from her late husband, who previously inherited it from Katharine’s own father: as a woman, she was simply deemed unsuited to the job, and so was bypassed until fate intervened. Conflict brews when one of Ben’s reporters unearths a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a secret document setting out the ongoing Vietnam War’s various failures and flaws. The
New York Times’s own reporting on the leak saw the newspaper muffled with a federal injunction from the
Nixon regime, which means the very same would likely also come the Post’s way – potentially with jail time for all involved. For Ben, that’s just a red rag, temptingly wafted. “The one way to defend the right to publish is to publish,” he contends, while ruing the fact that his own staff didn’t land the scoop first. But Katharine, the living definition of the Washington elite, is penned in by cautious lawyers and vested interests, and counts former secretary of defence Robert Mcnamara (Bruce Greenwood) among her friends in high places.
What follows is a rousing and resonant newsroom procedural – but one concerned less with the business of gathering stories, in the style of Tom Mccarthy’s Spotlight, than with the moral imperative to print them, even if that comes at a significant personal cost. In terms of its plot’s place in history, The Post is basically a prequel to Alan Jpakula’s All The
President’s Men – the story of the same newspaper’s tangle with Watergate, in which the figure of Katharine Graham was notably absent. But it’s closer in spirit to Spielberg’s great Obama-era political film Lincoln: lots of closely argued wrangling and spats in offices and living rooms while the nation’s soul hangs in the balance. As Ben, Hanks brings to his trademark homespun decency a bristly and sardonic edge, and the result is as much fun as you’d expect. As in his previous Spielberg collaborations, the actor captures an entire personality in a handful of subtle physical tics. Here, the hungry newspaperman seems to be constantly leaning forward as he moves, as if trying to poke his nose into the future a second or two before everyone else.
Yet somehow, next to Streep, he’s a sideshow. Not because she upstages him, but because The Post is Katharine’s story more than anyone else’s, and hinges on this woman’s dawning realisation that she herself could be the right man for the job.
The ink-stained romance of the newspaper business plays up to Spielberg’s sentimental streak. There is a glorious sequence in which one of the key reporters, played with hangdog nobility by Bob Odenkirk, is tapping at his typewriter late at night when the printing presses rumble into action down below. He feels the building shudder and allows himself a satisfied smile: his words have literally caused the earth to shake.
The hot lead and rolled shirtsleeves make The Post an unmistakable period piece. But as both a tale from history and a call to arms, it gives you hope that cold truth might not yet be a thing of the past. The Post is released in UK cinemas on Friday, January 19