*This review discusses plot points which some may consider spoilers*
Making a timely drama that makes comment on or even judges current events is a complex business. It can come across as too pointed, or simply lazy. The current White House administration seems to have attracted more ire than has been seen in decades. What can make a political picture more subtle is to use past events to highlight issues of the contemporary world. But this can also be criticised for being too afraid of directly tackling an issue, and attempting simply to skirt it. At the end of the day, you can’t please everyone. But the itself attempt will no doubt be admired.
So when the most famous living filmmaker in the world, and seemingly still one of the hardest working, makes a pointed political statement with his latest big budget movie, it’s a big deal, and the world will listen. Steven Spielberg has said in interviews that he rushed into production on The Post after reading the script as he felt it was a story that needed to be told now. And when you are the most famous and most successful living director, you have the power to do that.
The story in question is of the 1971 publishing of the famous Pentagon Papers, the confidential and classified analysis and account of America’s involvement in Vietnam from the 1940s through to the 1960s. They encompassed the presidencies of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times begins publishing details from the papers, but an injunction is put in place by President Richard Nixon. Having gotten hold of a copy of the document, the Washington Post’s owner Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor in chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) must decide whether to risk legal action and even imprisonment in order to publish more revelations from the papers.
That revelation from Spielberg that The Post was rushed through production is telling. The film feels incredibly fresh, and has an inherent urgency to it that is palpable. The film is full of swift sequences that seem to zip by purely because in the incendiary political times being portrayed, they have to. Characters race from location to location, information is thrust from one person to another, telephone calls are answered almost instantly. This is an energetically told, important story of journalistic integrity under attack from a ruthless Republican government. Timely is an understatement.
However, that rushed production schedule also betrays other less than stellar issues. The film does not feel ‘lived in’ in its period reproduction. The gold standard of against the clock journalism films is still Alan J. Pakula’s All The President’s Men from 1976, set just a year after The Post’s time setting during the Watergate scandal. Perhaps because it was filmed in such close proximity to the events it was portraying, the film still feels astonishingly authentic, with a documentary feel throughout. The Post often feels like playing dress up. This could be seen as a subversive step to make the film feel even more pertinent to current events, but I suspect it is more likely just rough edges on a rushed production.
Many of the supporting actors too, a who’s who of great character actors, also get short changed. This is very much a two hander between Streep and Hanks, who between them dominate the screen time. Both turn in expectedly solid, if generally unremarkable work. Bob Odenkirk comes out best of the supporting roles as assistant editor Ben Bagdikian. But Sarah Paulson, Matthew Rhys, Carrie Coon, and particularly the wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg, himself appearing for all of around two minutes of screen time, are all criminally under-utilised. This approach helps to sharpen the focus, but it makes the film feel less rounded, and far less richly textured.
The satiric and subversive intimations are indeed admirable, but the story of a newspaper deciding whether or not just to publish revelations from the Pentagon Papers seems a less attractive story than that of the stealing and copying of the document in the first place from the Rand Corporation by Daniel Ellsberg. This would seem to lend itself far more to being filmed, with perhaps more at stake for a single man than for a national newspaper just gone public. Even so, the Washington Post angle at least means the film can get in some additionally timely material from Katherine Graham’s sense of attempting to run a successful newspaper in a powerfully male dominated world.
In whatever manner the story is told, the Pentagon Papers release and publication was an important moment of rebellion against a government that had been misleading the world for decades. The Post is an admirable and captivatingly told version of those events, from a filmmaker who continues to be unpredictable, and endlessly exciting.
So when the most famous living filmmaker in the world, and seemingly still one of the hardest working, makes a pointed political statement with his latest big budget movie, it’s a big deal, and the world will listen. Steven Spielberg has said in interviews that he rushed into production on The Post after reading the script as he felt it was a story that needed to be told now. And when you are the most famous and most successful living director, you have the power to do that.
The story in question is of the 1971 publishing of the famous Pentagon Papers, the confidential and classified analysis and account of America’s involvement in Vietnam from the 1940s through to the 1960s. They encompassed the presidencies of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times begins publishing details from the papers, but an injunction is put in place by President Richard Nixon. Having gotten hold of a copy of the document, the Washington Post’s owner Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor in chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) must decide whether to risk legal action and even imprisonment in order to publish more revelations from the papers.
That revelation from Spielberg that The Post was rushed through production is telling. The film feels incredibly fresh, and has an inherent urgency to it that is palpable. The film is full of swift sequences that seem to zip by purely because in the incendiary political times being portrayed, they have to. Characters race from location to location, information is thrust from one person to another, telephone calls are answered almost instantly. This is an energetically told, important story of journalistic integrity under attack from a ruthless Republican government. Timely is an understatement.
However, that rushed production schedule also betrays other less than stellar issues. The film does not feel ‘lived in’ in its period reproduction. The gold standard of against the clock journalism films is still Alan J. Pakula’s All The President’s Men from 1976, set just a year after The Post’s time setting during the Watergate scandal. Perhaps because it was filmed in such close proximity to the events it was portraying, the film still feels astonishingly authentic, with a documentary feel throughout. The Post often feels like playing dress up. This could be seen as a subversive step to make the film feel even more pertinent to current events, but I suspect it is more likely just rough edges on a rushed production.
Many of the supporting actors too, a who’s who of great character actors, also get short changed. This is very much a two hander between Streep and Hanks, who between them dominate the screen time. Both turn in expectedly solid, if generally unremarkable work. Bob Odenkirk comes out best of the supporting roles as assistant editor Ben Bagdikian. But Sarah Paulson, Matthew Rhys, Carrie Coon, and particularly the wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg, himself appearing for all of around two minutes of screen time, are all criminally under-utilised. This approach helps to sharpen the focus, but it makes the film feel less rounded, and far less richly textured.
The satiric and subversive intimations are indeed admirable, but the story of a newspaper deciding whether or not just to publish revelations from the Pentagon Papers seems a less attractive story than that of the stealing and copying of the document in the first place from the Rand Corporation by Daniel Ellsberg. This would seem to lend itself far more to being filmed, with perhaps more at stake for a single man than for a national newspaper just gone public. Even so, the Washington Post angle at least means the film can get in some additionally timely material from Katherine Graham’s sense of attempting to run a successful newspaper in a powerfully male dominated world.
In whatever manner the story is told, the Pentagon Papers release and publication was an important moment of rebellion against a government that had been misleading the world for decades. The Post is an admirable and captivatingly told version of those events, from a filmmaker who continues to be unpredictable, and endlessly exciting.
