‘POST’ DELIVERS
Streep, Hanks battle for press freedom in historic drama
Steven Spielberg returns to top form with “The Post,” a historical drama celebrating the irreplaceable role the Fourth Estate and newspapers played and still play in the national political discourse. Like Peter Landesman’s unfairly overlooked recent film “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” and the 1976 classic “All the President’s Men,” “The Post” tells the story of how the tainted White House of Richard Nixon threatened to turn the United States into a constantly-at-war dictatorship by limiting the freedom of the press and intimidating its domestic enemies.
After a combat prelude in Vietnam to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Green River,” we see RAND Corp. analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) collect what become known as the Pentagon Papers from the offices of the Washington, D.C., think tank and give them to a reporter. The papers were put there by Secretary of Defense Robert A. McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), who is a friend of Katherine “Kay” Graham (a flawless Meryl Streep), the owner of the great and influential daily newspaper The Washington Post.
McNamara had the papers stored at RAND for study. They prove a historical pattern of the U.S. government and its presidents, including John F. Kennedy, lying to citizens about the number of military and civilian casualties and the daunting cost of the war.
The New York Times prints some of the information, but is stopped from printing any more by a court injunction. If the Post can get its hands on the papers, it can go ahead and print more of the information. But Graham, her friend and at times combative editor Ben Bradlee (a superb Tom Hanks), and the editors and reporters assigned to decipher the unnumbered pages can all go to jail if a court finds them guilty of a crime, which is more than possible. It may even be likely.
At the same time, Graham is taking the newspaper, which is not making much of a profit (those were the days), public, and a government injunction and indictments could kibosh the deal. The day before, Graham and Bradlee’s biggest political problem was that the Nixon White House would not allow Post reporter Judith Martin (Jessie Mueller) to cover the wedding of Nixon’s daughter, Tricia. When, the film asks, are the good people in the United States government going to stand up, regardless of party affiliation, and say, “Enough.”
Like “Mark Felt,” “The Post,” which was written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer (“Spotlight”), does not have an actor play Richard Nixon, although in one scene we see TV icon Walter Cronkite speaking on television.
The supporting cast is uniformly remarkable: Tracy Letts as Graham’s right-hand corporate man, Bob Odenkirk as editor Ben Bagdikian, Alison Brie as Graham’s strong-willed daughter Lally, suddenly ubiquitous Jesse Plemons as attorney Roger Clark.
In one scene, a female reporter remarks that it’s time to “tell these guys what’s what.” I confess I got weepy during the hot-lead-typesetting climactic montage. Graham, who walks past a gauntlet of admiring young women in a memorable final scene, inherited her newspaper after her husband’s death. “The Post” argues it’s a good thing for the country she did.