By Ann Hornaday / The Washington Post
In 1971, Katharine Graham had been running The Washington Post Co. 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 skeptical 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 the summer of ‘71 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 existential 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, not to mention the vindictive administration of President Richard M. Nixon.
Those tense couple of weeks in June form the spine of “The Post,” a fleet, 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 from a script by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, “The Post” canters along with crisp pacing and straightforward, unfussy clarity, its two icons-playing-icons bolstered by a superb cast of supporting players.
Unlike the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” which Singer also co-wrote, “The Post” isn’t a subdued ode to cinematic restraint and shoe-leather reporting. Rather it’s a purposefully rousing homage to the ideals of journalistic independence, governmental accountability and gender equality that isn’t averse to underlining, italicizing and boldfacing why those principles are more important than ever.
All of those themes are embodied by Graham, portrayed by Streep in a finely tuned, continually shifting performance that begins with her character literally tripping over a chair in Washington’s tony F Street Club and ends with her walking through The Post’s printing plant as a far tougher, more confident, yet still aristocratically remote figure.
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. The film’s most memorable moments belong to Streep’s sometimes awkwardly sympathetic character as she enters yet another board room populated by men or, later in the story, when she emerges from the Supreme Court to find a sea of upturned faces of young women there to cheer her on.
Hanks is just as sympathetic in his depiction of Bradlee, a performance loomed over by Jason Robards’ Oscar-winning turn in the still-and-always-supreme “All the President’s Men,” about the Post’s Watergate era. If Hanks doesn’t bring Robards’ macho sex appeal to his depiction of Bradlee, he makes up for it in authenticity that feels lived-in and unforced.
Propelled by alarm at the election of Donald Trump last year, Spielberg and his lead actors put “The Post” in front of cameras in record time, starting production in May of this year and bringing it to theaters in a scant six months.
And, as he so often does, the director tacked on an extra ending for the benefit of the cheap seats that always come first in his calculations, subtlety be damned.
And subtlety is damned, for eternity, in John Williams’ shamelessly manipulative score.
Still, that instinctive sense of what it takes to connect with a mass audience — so often snobbily dismissed as “middlebrow” — is precisely what distinguishes Spielberg as an artist, and it allows “The Post” to go for broke with such unselfconscious energy, feeling and, every so often, sheer beauty.
“The Post” (4 stars)
About: Icon Steven Spielberg directs icons Meryl Streep (as Katharine Graham) and Tom Hanks (as Ben Bradlee) in the rousing — and suddenly very timely — story of how The Washington Post defied an authoritarian president in 1971 and published the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the secret history of the Vietnam War.
Rated: PG-13, for coarse language and brief war violence
Showing: Pacific Place
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