The Post

The Post 2017 U.S. (116 minutes) directed by Steven Spielberg; written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer; cinematography by Janusz Kaminski; editing by Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn; casting by Ellen Lewis; dedicated to Nora Ephron.

A movie can be a balm in troublous times, especially if that movie is a splendidly-written, brilliantly-acted, beautifully-shot tableau of troublous times past.

Steven Spielberg’s telling of the Pentagon Papers story, The Post, focused on Katharine Graham, the former owner and ‘accidental’ head of The Washington Post, and her executive editor Ben Bradlee, is such a balm. It is hard to imagine that Meryl Streep as Graham and Tom Hanks as Bradlee could be any better, and their superb performances raise those of all around them. 

 

It also is hard to imagine a more loaded gun at this historical moment than the Pentagon Papers story. But in this age of Wikileaks and King Corn Silk, The Post is a story about family, and a newspaper which, especially in former times, is very much a noisy and contentious family, and how both a family and a newspaper are the sum of each and every part.

One of the many beauties of this film is that it shows a newspaper to be a living thing of nearly infinite parts, down to single letters of type, which each day starts from scratch and ends with the miracle of a fully-integrated, finished product.

But the greatest wonder of this picture is the restraint Spielberg shows in not bill-boarding THE MESSAGE like the nine letters that spell ‘HOLLYWOOD’ on the Hollywood Hills, as so often is his wont. Yes, it is about a Strong Woman, and how this Strong Woman shone a light to others—but not at that time. Thankfully, we only get one embarrassing tracking shot of Graham descending the US Supreme Court steps bathed in the collective golden gaze of a crowd of adoring young women.

Because Meryl Streep, as Graham, embodies this message: she shows it time and again, each time better than before, without anyone’s help but the camera that loves her.

In any case, most of the young people outside the Supreme Court in our jaded memory would be either protestors, or tourists or student groups waiting in line to get in. And in 1971 it is unlikely that anyone but insiders would know who Kay Graham was, what she looked like, and what role she had played.

The Pentagon Papers began as an unvarnished internal report ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the history of US involvement in Southeast Asia. The result was a 7,000-page, 47-volume history. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who worked at Rand Corporation, found a copy of this top secret report at Rand, took it home and copied it. He then leaked it to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

The Washington papers at this time—the liberal Washington Post and its soon thereafter defunct conservative competitor The Evening Star—were not national papers like The New York Times. They were publications focused on the local industry, which in Washington is national politics, and events such as White House weddings. Graham was a Washington socialite with no profession or work experience. She had grown up with her father’s paper, and her father had passed the reins to her husband Phil Graham. She became the publisher after her husband killed himself in 1963.  

Spielberg’s story takes place at a critical moment eight years later. Graham wants The Washington Post to be a quality national paper. She also needs to take the business public to ensure that it will be a going concern. Bradlee, an editor with a supernatural news sense as great editors have, feels in his bones that The Times’s Neil Sheehan is going to break a big story.

Bradlee grabs an intern, gives him $40 and tells to jump on a train to New York, go to The New York Times and find out what Neil Sheehan is working on.

‘Is that legal?’ the intern asks.

‘What do you think we do here for a living, kid?’ comes the reply.

The story moves quickly from Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) in Vietnam; to a set piece in which Graham battles her all-male board, whom as a socialite they do not take seriously; to Bradlee’s race to try to beat a competitor to a scoop; to the enormity of the Pentagon Papers. This narrative trajectory brings Graham full circle because it leads her to McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), a key figure in the Vietnam story and one of her close personal social friends.

The Times’s publication of Sheehan’s story brings down the wrath of President Richard Nixon; The Post (and presumably a number of other papers) gets Pentagon Paper excerpts as a federal judge in New York grants the government’s request for an injunction blocking further disclosure. Bradlee’s reporters track down Ellsberg and their own set of documents. So Graham must decide whether to risk breaking the law by publishing the story, going against the wishes of her board—a composite fictional character in the person of Arthur Parsons (Bradley Whitford)—and possibly jeopardizing her IPO. The rest is history, though we were stiff afterward because the drama is so visceral.

And rather than close on a reverent note after Kay Graham says ‘I don’t think I could ever live through something like this again,’ the camera shows us a security guard finding a door taped open, passing through to the office of the Democratic National Committee. The guard calls DC Metropolitan Police: ‘I think we may have a burglary in progress at the Watergate.’