The Post: Stodgy Storytelling

The Post is a stereotypical awards contender. 1. Directed by Steven Spielberg; 2. starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep; 3. telling the true story of the journalists who published the Pentagon papers in 1971 about the scope of the US government's machinations in the Vietnam War. Everything about this screams, "Oscar!" and yet that might be its very undoing. Because wrapped in such glossy packaging, the actual content of this film fails to deliver.

Streep plays Kay Graham, the new owner of the Washington Post following her husband's suicide. She is a woman who wakes up every morning with newspapers strewn about her blankets and her glasses on the verge of being crushed. She has hired Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) as the dogged editor-in-chief of her beloved Post, but even he can't do enough to improve the paper's finances, so she is preparing for the Post's IPO, where members of the public will be able to buy stock and diminish her family's control of the newspaper. She loves the Post with all of her heart but she was raised to be a socialite rather than a businesswoman, and much of this movie pays homage to the struggles she faced being the only woman in a boardroom or at the stock exchange, and the soul-crushing impostor syndrome that accompanied her every decision. As a woman with her fair share of struggles in that department, that is perhaps the only part of this movie that appealed to me and was conveyed well by Streep.

However, the story itself is a bit anticlimactic. After all, the New York Times initially got their hands on the Pentagon Papers. It was only after Nixon's Attorney General banned them from publishing that the Washington Post stepped up, found the Times' source, and published the Papers themselves after much agonized deliberation between Bradlee and Graham. Therefore, there's less excitement about reporters finding the scoop, than there is footage of reporters putting papers together in numerical order as Bradlee's long-suffering wife serves them sandwiches. There are important monologues about freedom of the press or the government overstepping its bounds, and swelling music anytime a Supreme Court decision is announced, accompanied by a choking sob and teary eyes. It's not subtle, unless your definition of subtlety is being hit in the head with an anvil while someone kicks your shin with a lead-toed boot.

I truly wanted this movie to be better. But I always felt like the actors were acting really hard and didn't lose themselves in their roles, the music was hammering me into submission, and every scene was nudging me to a foregone conclusion. There are no surprises in this movie - we already know what happened, and the manufactured stakes feel a bit trite and cliched. My favorite part of the film might simply be the wonderful shots of the printing press and watching how a newspaper actually gets made, from the frantic typing of the reporter, to the rapid editing, painstaking linotype, running of the presses, and eventual distribution across the Eastern seaboard. While the advent of computers must have certainly made things easier, this movie did make me long to see an actual printing press in action.

The Post is a solid movie. Solid, but also stolid. The best parts about it are its depiction of being a woman in a powerful position at the time, and its depiction of how a newspaper gets made. In terms of its earnest defense of freedom of the press, I get it, Spielberg had ulterior motives, making this movie in a quick nine months right after Trump was elected President. It's eerie to see how elements of this story from the 70s mirror our current national state. This entire movie can be summed up by the Washington Post's motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness. But I don't think we needed this movie to remind us that we need to join the Resistance.