Runtime: 1 hour, 56 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Steven Spielberg
Quick Impressions:
My newly-nine-year-old daughter loves to feel inspired by powerful women. When Hillary Clinton did not become the first female President of the United States, she was crushed. And the moment she saw the first theatrical trailer for The Post, she was hooked. For weeks, she’s been begging us to take her to the movie, and finally we did. Since (like most third graders) she has never expressed particular interest in Robert McNamara or the Pentagon Papers, I have to assume that the foretaste of Meryl Streep’s electric performance as Washington Post owner Kay Graham was what got her attention. My daughter was excited to see a strong woman make a contribution to history. (Plus she likes to get an Icee.) I, meanwhile, was thrilled that she wanted to watch an Oscar contender with me. (Plus I could actually take her to the theater to see it without looking like a bad parent because unlike so many of the others, The Post is not rated R.)
Is The Post a good movie? Well, my nine-year-old went in full of wide-eyed wonder and left satisfied, so obviously it got something right.
This awards season is kind of unpredictable. (I mean, I just watched Frances McDormand basically tell people to vote for someone else for the Oscar at the end of her SAG acceptance speech.) But it’s hard not to expect Meryl Streep to be nominated for an Oscar on Tuesday morning (most likely along with McDormand, Saoirse Ronan, Sally Hawkins, and Margot Robbie). The entire film hinges on Streep’s performance, and The Post succeeds mainly (and I’m tempted to say only) because of Streep’s unrivaled ability to telegraph emotional complexity in a single gaze. With anyone else playing the role of Kay Graham, I’m not sure the movie would reach the same level of excellence. It’s a good film, and Tom Hanks is great, but it’s Meryl Streep’s performance that really makes The Post something special.
The Good:
Meryl Streep gets nominated so often that it’s tempting to say, “We should give somebody else a chance this year,” but now that I’ve seen her performance I feel she truly deserves the nomination. Most actresses are not even capable of what she’s doing here, not even on their very best day.
Her Kay Graham is the reason to see this movie. It seems so odd that anyone wanting to write a female driven story about powerful women changing history would choose the Pentagon Papers for a subject, but Liz Hannah and Josh Singer have really pulled it off.
Usually when historical fiction highlights women or women’s points of view, there’s a certain amount of grumbling from people who consider these efforts “revisionist history” servicing a “feminist agenda” as if the past is a purely male space and women have only been injected into it retroactively to suit someone’s agenda-driven false narrative. But I mean, women have always existed, and they’ve always been doing stuff, whether or not male historians have been paying attention to them.
This film (though admittedly pretty heavy-handed) does an excellent job of finding women’s contributions to the story and showing them to us.
Why is the Washington Post on the outs with the Nixon White House in the first place? A female society columnist insulted a first daughter and then crashed her wedding. How did former administrations keep prominent journalists from looking for and reporting on their corruption? They socialized with them, attending parties organized by their wives and forging friendships of convenience maintained by wives of both the journalists and the politicians.
We see the tremendous (and historic) decision placed on the shoulders of Post owner Kay Graham. We see Kay’s concerns and anxieties as she struggles to make the right decision. Streep lets us see her come to the decision motivated by both principle (to fight to preserve freedom of the press as guaranteed by the First Amendment) and personal motives. (Is someone really a friend deserving your protection if he’s knowingly sent your son off as bullet fodder in a war that can’t be won?)
Even the Sarah Paulson character, only in the story because she’s the devoted wife of Tom Hanks’s Ben Bradlee, contributes meaningfully to the story. She emphasizes to her husband (and the audience) just what a momentous decision Kay Graham is making. (It’s nice to get a female perspective on this, to have this explained to us in a female voice.) And she also makes snacks. (Her popping in to take a head count may actually be my favorite moment in the movie.)
I actually love the way that the film highlights that what’s a man’s story is probably already also a woman’s story, too. We don’t need to alter the past to work in women; we simply need to look at existing events more closely (and sometimes from a different angle).
Now is the film a little heavy handed about its message? Um…yes. (Meryl Streep encountering every smiling woman in the world as she wades through the crowd walking down the courthouse steps is maybe a little much.) But sometimes people can be a bit…how can I put this? Stupid.
Well stupid may be a bit harsh. What I mean is, while watching The Post, you can’t possibly miss its emphasis on how important women are, and that’s probably a good thing because subtlety is lost on many people.
My favorite detail (that actually is kind of subtle) is one we learn early in the film, that Kay Graham herself hired Ben Bradlee after deliberately firing his predecessor. I’m so glad the movie gives us that information. Some of Kay’s associates clearly believe that she has fallen under the influence of Bradlee, that she makes her big decision while under his sway. But if she hired him herself, he must be taking things in a direction she likes. Perhaps she finds his loud, brash, male voice useful for articulating her own opinions. That’s a marvelous bit of information for us to have.
Steven Spielberg knows exactly what he’s doing here. He’s to be applauded for making a movie with a message so blatantly feminist that you’d have to be asleep to miss it. He has a very loud voice. I think it’s quite bold to deliver such a pointed message when you know that you’re Steven Spielberg and everyone in the world will hear you.
Of course, the movie also emphasizes the importance of a free press and the dangers of a president who thinks he is the state and views the press as the enemy. (Bob Odenkirk’s Ben Bagdikian has a lot of fantastic lines about this.)
Ben Bradlee has some great lines about having the courage to rise to an occasion you never saw coming. As I watched, I felt like Hanks’s character was speaking for Steven Spielberg.
And speaking of speaking…I absolutely love that The Post lets Richard Nixon speak for himself. When we hear his end of phone conversations, it really is Nixon, his actual voice. Using that technique reminds me of the Princess Di scenes in The Queen. It really works here.
The antagonists in this film are not being silenced. They are being listened to. They are literally speaking for themselves. The papers are using McNamara’s own study to condemn him, and the film is letting Nixon hang himself in the same way.
As someone who went into this knowing very little about the Pentagon Papers, I also appreciated the incentive to learn more about the topic. (Somehow, despite knowing tons of English history and a fair amount of world history, I’ve never formally studied U.S. history after World War II.)
Best Scene:
The whole movie builds to the moment when Kay Graham is on the phone–with seemingly everyone who works for her and everyone else in the house and everyone in the other house and some other people and…basically the entire cast, I guess–trying to decide whether to publish the papers. Streep is so brilliant here. Everybody’s yelling into the phone, but it’s her pauses that are coming through to us the loudest. I’m really not convinced that the movie could have succeeded with any other actress in this role.
Best Scene Visually:
After the movie, my husband and I discussed the scene “where Meryl Streep’s eyes go black as if she’s being attacked by Dementors.” How is she doing that? It’s so drastic it looks like CGI. Seriously Meryl Streep could probably convince people she was an erupting volcano just by acting. She has such an amazing gift. It’s honestly a little ridiculous.
In most cases, the cinematography in this is not great. The cameras just seem to be on pointed at something. But the something is Meryl Streep. She is the one who makes the movie interesting to look at.
Runner up, the papers themselves. The papers and the newspaper printing plates are always shown to us as if they are fascinating to behold.
Best Action Sequence:
I love the scene when all the journalists are sorting madly through the papers, and Sarah Paulson peers in to take a quick headcount. The pace of the movie picks up dramatically here and never really slackens again.
Best of all is the moment when Tom Hanks yells, “NO!”
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Meryl Streep:
I like Streep’s scene with Bruce Greenwood (who is quite good himself as McNamara). I love the way she begins to feel certain here that for some of the men in her life “advise” is code for “manipulate and bully.” I love the way she responds to his impassioned rant.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Tom Hanks:
I’d love to see Hanks get an Oscar nomination for his performance as Bradlee, but the category is so crowded. I have no idea if he’ll squeeze in there somehow. We’ll see.
He and Meryl Streep have such fabulous chemistry. It’s truly hard to believe that they’ve never been on screen together before. (And it’s so rare and refreshing to see a male and female lead who are not romantically involved.)
Probably my favorite moment comes when Hanks yells, “NO!” But the scene most likely to be used as an Oscar clip is the anecdote he tells about Jackie Kennedy.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Bob Odenkirk:
I doubt Odenkirk will get a nomination, but he’s pretty brilliant in the movie. Up until the conference call scene, Ben Bagdikian’s journey to track down the papers is probably the most exciting part of the film.
His reaction when confronted about his source is both subtle and powerful.
The Negatives:
The beginning of the film is slow. Really, really slow. Like really. Slow.
My husband said that for him the movie started when Streep’s character said a certain line on the phone, and…um…that happens near the end of the movie.
As beginnings go, the opening scene in Vietnam seems pretty unremarkable, which struck me as problematic–honestly a bit disappointing–while I watched. When it ended, I thought, “Well that was all pretty standard and monotonous. Why not give us something unique instead of something so by-the-numbers, slaughter-in-the-jungle generic?” With a little distance, I will allow that the lack of specialness may be the point. Perhaps beyond establishing a motive for stealing the papers, this scene emphasizes the pointless monotony of Vietnam. Maybe the movie is illustrating that its battles are thoroughly unromantic, virtually indistinguishable, and, essentially, pointless. All they do is kill young men.
Still while I will acknowledge that there’s a (very good) reason for the scene to be so dull, the immediate effect is not great for the movie. If I were directing a contender for Best Picture, I would want to impress the audience right away. (Of course, I guess the name Steven Spielberg does that. He doesn’t have to be as cautious as an inexperienced filmmaker. He’s earned the privilege to do things the way he wants.)
I also didn’t like the score. I thought its frenzied intensity frequently overpowered the events onscreen instead of complementing them. At one moment, I remember thinking in dismay, “I really dislike this score. That’s terrible because it’s probably by John Williams, and I usually love his work.” Now I will say that I liked the theme better as it played over the credits. I don’t have actual musical training (except for piano lessons with my mother when I was a child), so describing exactly what I didn’t like is difficult for me. All I can say is I liked one section of the main theme but not another section. So that’s not terribly helpful. You’ll have to listen yourself and make your own decision.
I wasn’t particularly a fan of the look of the film, either. The work of the lead actors was riveting and a delight to watch, but the camera just showed them to us and let them give us something to look at. I guess that’s refreshing in a way, better than contrived camera angles and oddly composed shots for no reason, I guess. For some reason, Bob Odenkirk’s scenes have the most interesting look, maybe because he’s frequently hanging around with the papers themselves, which are practically fetishized. But in general everything is kind of soft and gray like a kitten in the rain. That actually sounds quite appealing, so maybe I should compare it to a damp, dirty pigeon instead.
Overall:
The Post features a superb cast of strong actors led by Tom Hanks who gives a great performance as a highly sympathetic character and Meryl Streep who is so good she elevates the material and makes the movie Oscar worthy. Though ultimately compelling, the story is a bit slow in the beginning. My nine-year-old liked it, though, especially “the scene on the phone,” “the lemonade stand,” and “the way he kept just walking into her house.” If you’re a fan of American history or just a proponent of freedom of the press, you might want to spend a couple of hours watching The Post.