My Curated Cinema series of Movies to Remember When Mainstream Journalists Weren’t Afraid to Hold the Powerful to Account By continues with 2017’s The Post, dramatizing exciting journalistic events from just a year before those of yesterday’s installment, All the President’s Men.
Freedom of the press itself is at stake as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) must decide whether to make public the Pentagon Papers — a secret, brutal analysis of the disastrous Vietnam War leaked by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) — which the White House has already enjoined The New York Times from publishing. The White House had never gone to court before to thwart a newspaper, and it sounds pretty unAmerican. Indeed, Hanks’s Bradlee sums it up nicely: President Nixon is “taking a shit all over the First Amendment.”
The Post is from masterful director Steven Spielberg, who here casts typewriters and Xerox machines as weapons and makes typesetting suspenseful. He also managed to get Hanks and Streep together onscreen for the first time, and milks the hell out of their onscreen chemistry, which is often appropriately antagonistic and always palpable. Spielberg captures, in a compelling way, a signal event in the history of journalism, of holding a government to account, of the entire American experiment, in fact.
The Post never outright asks the questions Why should news be profitable? and Isn’t quality journalism a public service, not a business? but they are all over the film anyway. These are questions that the Post’s current owner, Amazon oligarch Jeff Bezos, clearly has no interest in.
US: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Sky/Now; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV; rent at BFI Player
See The Post at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
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