Review: The Post

Image courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.

Considering our current atmosphere in which the president of the United States has launched an assault on the freedom of the press and the Fourth Estate in general and introduced the dangerous phrase "fake news," Steven Spielberg's "The Post" couldn't be any more timely.

In Spielberg's picture, which chronicles The Washington Post's decision whether to release the Pentagon Papers, a president - in this case, Richard Nixon - has also branded the press as the enemy and works behind the scenes to prevent information from being disseminated to the public. The film is set during the 1970s in the heart of the Vietnam War. The peace movement has all but died out, but  the war remains highly unpopular.

A former military analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys (of "The Americans"), learns that the war's architects never really thought that the conflict was winnable and drew it out solely because they didn't want the United States to face the embarrassment of a defeat. Ellsberg leaks his story, first to The New York Times, which is prevented by a court order to publish further content from the Pentagon Papers, and then The Washington Post, led by publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep, with her juiciest role in some time) and executive managing editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks, also great).

Since she is the first woman to take the reins at the paper, her male counterparts - Bradlee mostly excluded - do not believe that she is fit for the job and, therefore, attempt to exert themselves when she gives the go-ahead to Bradlee, who the paper's executive board views as impulsive, and try to convince her to alter her course.

"The Post" is a swift moving film and noteworthy addition to the catalogue of newspaper movies, which, of course, include "All the President's Men," "Zodiac" and "Spotlight." The entire cast - which also includes Bob Odenkirk, Michael Stuhlbarg, Bruce Greenwood, Tracy Letts, Sarah Paulson and Alison Brie - is solid and Hanks and Streep are reliably excellent, and manage to clear the hurdle of making audiences forget that they are watching two of the most awarded actors in recent history.

There is one note that Spielberg, perhaps, should not have played. It comes near the end of the picture after the Pentagon Papers story has gone to press. Streep and Hanks hold a brief conversation in which they spell out a little too obviously the film's thesis regarding the importance of the Fourth Estate. It's a sentiment that is clearly running throughout the picture's two-hour running time and was not necessary to put into words.

Otherwise, "The Post" is a gripping newspaper drama and a clarion call in the age of Donald Trump. Unless I'm reviewing a Michael Moore film, I try to steer clear of politics in reviews, but this picture demands it. Every year around the holiday season, studio bosses release films that they consider their highest in quality and those that they occasionally believe to be, for lack of a better word, important. It's a rare thing when a film actually rises to the level of importance and even rarer when it manages to be good in the process. "The Post" is very good and undoubtedly important.