Review of The Post (2017) by Glenn P — 29 Dec 2017

This is a love letter to the Fifth Estate, the First Amendment, the free press. Of course, the parallels to today's current political climate cannot be escaped, and as the movie audience I watched it with applauded and cheered at every brave decision that was made, I had to smile; the movie toes the line at being jingoistic propaganda.

What really worked for this movie was the framing of The Washington Post as a newspaper trying to make it in the world of hard-hitting journalism, a world dominated by The Gray Lady herself, The New York Times. Like Katharine Graham, The Post was not taken as seriously as more established institutions (i.e., men), and here we see Graham and The Post have more to offer the world than just letting the big boys do their thing.

I always took for granted that The Washington Post was a formidable institution and a paper at the same level as The New York Times, which is why I found the casting of Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham perfect in retrospect. Like my presumptions about the history of The Washington Post, my presumptions about Meryl Streep helped inform my perception of Katharine Graham, so imagine my surprise to see this woman having to work up the nerve to make a decision that should have been easy for a powerful woman to make. To witness Streep playing a character so unsure of herself, surrounded her whole life by men, brought up to believe that her place was naturally one of subservience, was so at odds with what I believed Streep to be, it played perfectly with what I believed The Washington Post had always been: a time-tested force of nature. This movie isn't Spotlight, but it is one of the better journalism movies made.