Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks fight for the freedom of the press in Steven Spielberg’s intelligent and classy telling of how The Washington Post incurred the wrath of Richard Nixon by exposing damming analysis of the Vietnam War.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Screenwriters: Liz Hannah and Josh Singer

Synopsis:

*Spoilers* 1965. Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), a military analyst with the RAND Corporation, copies top secret government documents, known as the Pentagon Papers. The material comprises thousands of pages of analysis which revealed that four consecutive US presidents (Truman to Johnson) were concealing facts about the Vietnam war. Commissioned by secretary of defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), the papers are highly damaging to the government and the current president, Nixon. Ellsberg has seen up close the bloody quagmire of the war and is determined to expose the truth to the public.

1971. Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), the publisher of The Washington Post, is preparing to take her family’s business public. A lone woman among male executives, Graham is somewhat out of her depth, having taken over the business following the suicide of her husband. The fact she inherited the business, and that many of the men are not comfortable with her in charge, is made quite clear.

Graham gets a call from Nixon’s chief of staff to inform her that the Post’s reporter is not welcome at the forthcoming wedding of the president’s daughter, highlighting conflict between the paper and the White House.

In the newsroom, managing editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) gets wind of a ‘big story’ The New York Times may be working on. He sends an intern up to NY to investigate. Graham is contacted by her old friend McNamara to tell her that something unflattering is about to be published about him.

The Times runs a story on the Pentagon Papers. Bradlee is incensed at not getting the story first. He is determined to follow up and publish more on the Papers.

While at dinner with Times editor Abe Rosenthal (Michael Stuhlbarg), Graham overhears that the government is taking the NY paper to court to get it to stop publishing top secret material. Nixon duly wins an injunction against publication.

Post journalist Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) tracks down his old colleague Ellsberg, who gives him 1,000 pages of classified material. The Post has its story.

With the IPO hanging in the balance and the threat of legal implications, Graham has a dilemma over whether to proceed with the story. In New York for the public offering, Graham, whose own son fought in Vietnam, sees the public backlash against the war, as protesters gather in the streets.

Graham decides to go ahead and authorise publication. Legal action duly follows. Momentum to publish builds and soon other newspapers from across the country are covering the Pentagon Papers.

The Post wins its Supreme Court case, with the lead justice underlining that it is the duty of the press to be the voice of the people, not the mouthpiece of the government. Nixon rails against the decision and bans the Post from entering the White House.

A little later, at the Watergate Hotel, a security guard reports a suspected break in…

Analysis:

*Spoilers* Just as he did with Bridge of Spies (2015), Spielberg has delivered an intelligent film that feels very much rooted in the older traditions of filmmaking. The Post is a solid piece of work that harnesses the talents of not only its weighty cast (with some big names appearing in supporting roles), but its wider creative team; not least co-writer Josh Singer, who also penned, among others, Spotlight (2015), First Man (2018) and multiple episodes of The West Wing (1999-2006). However, just because the credentials are in place, does it mean the resulting film achieves its aims? The answer would have to be, yes.

The film takes us right into the heart of the newsroom and also into the dilemma faced by Graham, who had to decide between publishing a story that was very much in the public interest, but which risked bankrupting the paper by derailing the IPO and pulling the plug on the cash that was to keep the business afloat.

While the action largely centres on Hanks’ Bradlee as he races to get his blockbuster story on to the Post’s frontpage, the story is equally about Graham’s transformation from a housewife and mother who found herself at the helm of a DC newspaper through tragic circumstances, to a strong in-charge publisher willing to make a difficult decision to defend her paper’s right to publish. It’s a subtle, but effective journey, with Streep striking the right balance, allowing Graham to grow into her burgeoning role, shedding her self-doubt (and the male-dominated attitude of those around her) and coming into her own.

The relationship between Graham and Greewood’s McNamara is also effectively handled, portraying a strong friendship threatened by the conflicting interests of the paper. While Bradlee is hustling to get his hands on the Papers, he asks Graham to use her long-standing friendship with McNamara to gain access to the material. She balks at the idea, reminding Bradlee of his own close relationship with John F Kennedy and wondering whether he considered him a friend or a source. It’s this constant back and forth between close political ties and journalistic integrity that form a key theme in the story.

As Bradlee, Hanks is charismatic and tenacious, bull-headedly determined to take his ‘little’ paper beyond the confines of DC and get it publishing important news. He is, of course, very much on the side of ‘publish and be dammed’, despite the potential immediate implications for the paper, arguing that if the Post bows to the will of the Nixon White House, it is already effectively out of business. The initial clash between hardcore newsman Bradlee and out-of-her-depth Graham subtly gives way to respect, as Graham comes around to Bradlee’s way of thinking.

As you might expect, the attention to detail is terrific, including a nice scene in which the Post’s frontpage is manually typeset, with the Pentagon Papers story front and centre. It’s also great to see some ‘old school’ pre-digital reporting, with Odenkirk’s Bagdikian scrabbling with his loose change at the payphone to get in touch with a source and the final copy getting sucked into the tube for its journey to the printroom.

Of course, there is no getting away from the fact that this is a ‘wordy’ film. While Bridge of Spies offered the chance for some Cold War derring-do to break up dialogue-heavy scenes, other than an opening sequence set in the heart of the Vietnam War (accompanied by the obligatory Creedence Clearwater Revival track), this is a film about people in offices and corridors and big houses talking about important stuff. For anyone who finds this kind of film hard work, The Post may be a bit heavy going.

However, for those who appreciate the ability of film to take its audience behind closed doors, this is a great example of the competing interests involved in running a newspaper, with the added wider implications and historical context. It’s also interesting to see a Nixon-era film that focuses on something other than Watergate.

While the two films have much in common (including a wonderful cast), The Post is less ‘procedural’ than Spotlight, as it focuses more on the wider themes of the freedom of the press and its role in keeping a ‘check’ on the government.

The decision of the Supreme Court and the eagerness of the Post (et al) to publish material that damaged the government nicely segues into the start of the Watergate scandal and the paper’s role in bringing the ugliness and criminality of the White House to the public’s attention. As such, when the credits of The Post roll, you almost want to immediately watch what still may be the best of all the ‘journalists getting their hands dirty to expose the truth’ films…

Watch the trailer:

If you like The Post, you may also like:

All the President’s Men (1976): Alan J Pakula’s classic serves as the perfect ‘follow-up’ to The Post, as it takes us back into the same newsroom a year later, where reporters Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) – on whose non-fiction book the film was based – investigate the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon. Among the film’s many other accolades, Jason Robards won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Ben Bradlee.

Shock & Awe (2017): Set in 2003, Rob Reiner’s real-life inspired tale tells of two crusading journalists (Woody Harrelson and James Marsden) who set out to reveal the truth about the US invasion of Iraq and the existence of those alleged weapons of mass destruction. This is a lesser-known newsroom film that could use a little more depth and gravitas, but nonetheless offers a perspective on the ‘war on terror’ and a conflict that, along with Afghanistan, has been likened to the Vietnam War in terms of its ‘unwinnable’ nature.

Spotlight (2015): Written by Josh Singer and directed by Tom McCarthy, this is a real ‘journalistic procedural’ film that shows us how a group of Boston Globe journalists exposed the shocking extent of paedophilia by Catholic priests and the almost equally shocking cover-up by the Catholic Archdiocese. The film takes us into the heart of the investigation and the conflict the paper faced in publishing its revelations in a community that was rooted in, and tied to, the very institution it was exposing.