The first thing to know about ‘The Post’, aside from the fact that it’s one of best and tick-tock timeliest movies of the year, is that it’s a love story.
That’s right. Steven Spielberg’s tense, terrific new drama celebrates the passionate bond between a free press and every thinking human being, however diminished the species in Donald Trump’s America.
The film is set in 1971, when Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham and Editor Ben Bradlee decided to defy threats from the Nixon White House and publish the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a massive cover-up involving the government and Vietnam. The powers that be continued to send young men overseas to die, even with full knowledge that the war was, in fact, unwinnable. It was military analyst Daniel Ellsberg who pilfered the papers, hoping to halt the carnage in Southeast Asia. And it was the New York Times who first published sections of the classified study until the President issued a stop order in the name of national security. It was up to the Beltway daily to pick up the baton. If they flouted Nixon’s orders and published, however, the WaPo leadership would face charges of conspiracy and jail time. Such a decision would also likely bring financial ruin to the newspaper that had been in Mrs Graham’s family for decades.
That’s the story. And that’s the movie, a rabble-rousing journalistic thriller filled with fierce commitment and fervent heart. Working from a dynamite script by newcomer Liz Hannah and a polish by Josh Singer, Spielberg never lets exposition slow down the First Amendment imperative at the core of his film. The veteran director, 70, practically made the movie on the run, hurrying the film through production while finishing up his videogame epic Ready Player One; he’s called The Post “a chase film about journalists.” Whatever fine-tuning might be lost in that push is more than compensated for by the film’s this-just-in urgency. Though the events of the film took place 46 years ago, you watch every minute of it in a hyper state of expectation. In an inspired touch, Spielberg uses tapes of Nixon’s real voice as he divulges his crimes and rails against the press for revealing them. Sound familiar?
The Post works as an explosively exciting journalistic procedural and as a vigorous investigation into how action defines character. Shot by the gifted Janusz Kaminski with a propulsive score by John Williams, this unapologetically old-school film gets the details right – including the hot type, the printing presses, the bundling of newspapers that get thrown from trucks and into the hands of an eager, pre-digital public. And then there’s the shoe-leather reporting, embodied by star journalist Ben Bagdikian pounding the pavement, dropping dimes into phones booths for secret calls and tracking Ellsberg to a motel room where the Pentagon Papers are scattered everywhere.
Still, it’s the two characters at the core of the film that raise the movie to must-see status.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, December 19th 2017.