Steven Spielberg’s The Post turns a 1971 newsroom crisis into a clean, fast political thriller. Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, and Tom Hanks plays executive editor Ben Bradlee. The film runs 116 minutes and follows the paper’s fight to publish the Pentagon Papers, the classified record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Daniel Ellsberg in Vietnam
The film opens in 1966 with Daniel Ellsberg embedded with American soldiers in Vietnam. Matthew Rhys plays him. Ellsberg decides the war is unwinnable, delivers his report to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and then watches McNamara publicly justify sending more troops.
The Leak at the RAND Corporation
Ellsberg goes to work for the RAND Corporation, a think tank with access to classified material. Over the following years he secretly copies thousands of pages documenting long-term U.S. interference in Vietnam, dating back to the Truman administration. He leaks the full collection to journalist Neil Sheehan at The New York Times.
Kay Graham and a Board of Men
Graham has run the Post for eight years, since the suicide of her husband Phil and the death of her father Eugene Meyer. She wants to take the company public and fund better national news. Her board views her as a widowed woman in over her head. Bradlee pushes for editorial independence whenever a story hits one of her friends. McNamara is one of them.
The Cast Around Streep and Hanks
Supporting roles carry the newsroom:
- Sarah Paulson as Tony Bradlee
- Bob Odenkirk as Ben Bagdikian
- Tracy Letts as Fritz Beebe
- Bradley Whitford as Arthur Parsons
- Bruce Greenwood as Robert McNamara
- Carrie Coon as Meg Greenfield
- Jesse Plemons as Roger Clark
- David Cross as Howard Simons
Liz Hannah and Josh Singer wrote the script. The Post premiered at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on December 14, 2017, opened in limited release on December 22, and went wide on January 12, 2018. It grossed $179 million worldwide.
What The Post Gets Right
The Post is at its best when it stays in the room. Streep’s Graham is the film’s real subject, a woman learning the cost of a decision her board would rather she avoid. Hanks gives Bradlee the drive the part needs, and Odenkirk’s Bagdikian is the supporting turn that sticks.
Spielberg’s direction keeps the machinery moving. The film has been read as a comment on the Nixon years and on then-incumbent Donald Trump, and that reading is fair.
Where The Post thins out is in the history. The Pentagon Papers story belonged to the Times first, and the film races past that to get to the Post’s turn. The result is a good film about a great subject.
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