{"id":7027,"date":"2018-01-23T07:11:24","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T12:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7027"},"modified":"2018-02-08T07:59:10","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T12:59:10","slug":"the-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7027","title":{"rendered":"The Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheI really wanted to love this movie (trailer<\/a>). It has everything I like\u2014a story about important principles, two impeccable stars and a terrific supporting cast, a newsroom setting. Director Steven Spielberg had much so much good stuff to work with\u2014including a decent script by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer\u2014why wasn\u2019t it better?<\/p>\n

One of the team\u2019s great decisions is to present Katherine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) not as a hard-nosed, successful businesswoman, but one growing into a not-always-comfortable role as publisher of the Washington Post<\/em> (a position first held by her father, then her late husband). In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) steals the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages of documents that recount the government\u2019s decades of deception about the Vietnam War, Graham faces a fateful choice of tremendous consequence: will the Post<\/em> will publish stories based on these top secret documents?<\/p>\n

On one hand, the paper\u2019s editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), and the newsroom staff are pushing to publish. For them, it\u2019s a \u201cfreedom of the press\u201d issue, a riveting story, and they\u2019re racing the clock to get in the game.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, her business advisors (notably, Tracy Letts as Fritz Beebe and Bradley Whitford as Arthur Parsons) and the Nixon Administration oppose publication, which is risky on several counts. First is legal jeopardy: already the Justice Department has taken the rival New York Times<\/em> to court on the matter. Barring the Times<\/em> from publishing more, at least temporarily, opens the door for the Post<\/em>. Then there\u2019s financial jeopardy: the bankers who backed the Post<\/em>\u2019s recent stock offering are threatening to pull out if the paper goes ahead.<\/p>\n

Graham\u2019s personal relations further muddy the waters. She\u2019s been friends for years with people who the Pentagon Papers show participated in the war deception, notably former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood). Is she respecting her family legacy by publishing or by holding back? In the end, of course, her decision sets the stage for the Post\u2019s<\/em> becoming one of the nation\u2019s premier newspapers.<\/p>\n

The newsroom Spielberg and the reporters create is an exciting place. As Bilge Ebiri<\/a> said in the Village Voice<\/em>, \u201cI started crying the first time I saw Tom Hanks\u2019s Ben Bradlee walk through a bustling, thriving newsroom . . . a whole world that\u2019s been lost.\u201d It\u2019s also fun to see the newspaper produced the old-fashioned way: linotype machines and hot lead. Victory is in the air when the Post\u2019s<\/em> trucks roll out of the printing plant in the early morning mist.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the problem? Why isn\u2019t this movie more satisfying? For me, it\u2019s because the central question\u2014will she or won\u2019t she?\u2014is one we already know the answer to. It\u2019s the scenes where we don\u2019t<\/em> know the outcome, like the powerful one where Graham confronts her old friend McNamara, that are the most compelling. Given that, drawing out her dithering (despite how expertly Streep dithers) seems, finally, fake. For a contrast, consider the movie Spotlight<\/em>. Again, we know the Globe<\/em> reporters get the priest abuse story, but every interview had qualities of uncertainty about it. It was a puzzle painstakingly assembled in front of our eyes.<\/p>\n

I also could have done without the tepid and too-stagy anti-war demonstrations and the bevy of eager young women waiting for Graham as she leaves the U.S. Supreme Court building. The point about her pioneering in a male world had been already made, much more effectively.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, in 2018, the story provides a vital reminder about the ongoing and urgent need for an unfettered news media to hold people in power to account.<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating: 88%; audiences 74%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I really wanted to love this movie (trailer). It has everything I like\u2014a story about important principles, two impeccable stars and a terrific supporting cast, a newsroom setting. Director Steven Spielberg had much so much good stuff to work with\u2014including … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Post - I really wanted to love this movie extravagantly. Why I didn't.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[266,261,57,104],"tags":[410,1223,1222,498,649,1221],"class_list":["post-7027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-journalism","category-movies","category-the-morgue","tag-meryl-streep","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-the-post","tag-tom-hanks","tag-washington-dc","tag-washington-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Pl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7029,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7027\/revisions\/7029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}