In 1 9 7 1, The Washington Post is in trouble. Ever since its publisher died, the newspaper is led by his inexperienced daughter Katherine Graham, and its readership is declining. The New York Times beats it again to the punch when it publishes a sensational report about the Pentagon Papers, i.e. how US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara knew that the Vietnam War could not be won, but continued sending American soldiers to die there for years, nonetheless. Executive editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, finally senses a big break when a court order forbids Times to publish any further info from the leaked report. Ben tracks down the analyst who copied thousands of pages of the classified report, Daniel Ellsberg, and decides to publish a summary of it, despite enormous opposition from the Nixon Government. This brings The Washington Post a huge surge in reputation.
In the later phase of his career, director Steven Spielberg started exploring political themes, yet none of these movies managed to advance into one of his finest classics. As it was the case with “Amistad” and “Lincoln”, “The Post” is also a noble, well meant, but overall too didactic, schematic presentation of a social issue, in this case freedom of the press and the right of a reasonable criticism. These dry topics are simply not that cinematic, and seem more like a PowerPoint lecture. However, the movie does become more engaging in the second half, where there is a race with time to publish the report before any Government crackdown, symbolized in the passionate sequence where Ben and a half a dozen reporters are trying to read through thousands of pages of the leaked report lying scattered on the floor of a house, in order to summarize all this for their new edition of the newspaper in only one day. That is a scene specific and worthy of Spielberg, yet there are not that many of them here. Tom Hanks is again great in the leading role of Ben, who laments to his staff that they are always reading news from someone else, and not discovering news themselves. An amusing hidden criticism is near the end, where Nixon is ordering his White House staff to forbid any further contact from The Washington Post reporters, which can be interpreted as a sly jab at the Donald Trump administration in 2017, which forbade CNN from asking questions during press conferences. “The Post” is a solid film, idealistic and pure, though it is kind of obvious that the real protagonist of this story was actually The New York Times, not The Washington Post, and that a similar journalistic film “All the President’s Men” was directed with much more passion and grandeur.
Grade:++
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