Review of The Post (2017) by Connor S — 02 Feb 2018

You know it's awards season when a movie comes out just in the nick of time to celebrate whatever is the cause du jour. It goes without saying that The Post is Oscar bait. Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring heavy-hitting actors like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, it is a movie that lionizes the press while America's President rails against it, but Oscar bait can only win an Oscar if it's a good movie, and The Post is an excellent movie.

The most impressive part of this movie is its vision. The movie is composed with a versatile style, employing techniques such as one-shots, tracking shots, handheld cameras, and zooming. What links each of these techniques is a single-minded attention to the action. It's a single-mindedness that's shared by the characters themselves. Some are only concerned with the story or the role of the press, others with the business concerns of running a newspaper. Props that provide tidbits of insight into these characters are placed with a pain-staking attention to detail, even when they are almost impossible to notice. As a whole, the movie is able to balance all of them. This movie is the brainchild of writer Liz Hannah, and with the help of Josh Singer, who wrote the similar tribute to journalism, Spotlight, she wrote a page-turning script that ties together a number of themes, including adversarial journalism, the challenges of running a business, and being a woman in a men's world, into a cohesive narrative. It's a smart enough scrip to not over-rely on exposition. A few throw-away lines and a cross-cutting sequence of public lies and the covered-up truth are all that's needed to explain way this story matters. To top it off, the occasional line brings some much-needed levity.

That's not to say this movie isn't completely unpretentious. Ultimately, The Post is a movie made for awards, so it pays tribute to film almost as much as it does to journalism. Streep and Hanks put on exactly the star-turn performances expected. The lighting is set up as if the movie is being performed on a stage, oftentimes so strong that you can see the dust in the air. By the end of the film, shadows start to resemble a classic noir style. While The Post for the most part expects the audience to understand, it can't help but indulge in thinly-veiled sermons about its message. It's a preachy tendency that can make even passionate never-Trump-ers roll their eyes, but there is one redeeming quality to it: the events of this movie happened under a different President. That crucial detail reminds us that press freedom is a value that must always be defended, not just against a single villain.