The Post
A very well made but also very straight forward movie about a moving moment in newspaper publishing history. Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep are both superb-and the few scenes where it is just the two of them (like an early restaurant conversation) they are really amazing. Worth seeing just for that, if you love good acting.
But what drives the movie is a sense of justice-and a certainly pro-democracy anti-Republican kind of justice (that's a given, these days). That is-Nixon was a crook and was trying to squash the free press, and the people behind the scenes, publisher and editor, were caught in a trap because they were in many ways part of the social and political world of their subjects.
This is where the movie has real potential, trying to remind us how even newspapers are caught up in the actual net they are reporting on. Which means lots of conflicts. The screenplay starts to deal with this (the writers would insist they dealt with it thoroughly) but in fact they miss a real opportunity to talk about a huge problem of boundaries and honesty in reporting. And publishing.
What the movie turns to more convincingly is a straight up drama about the courage of a relatively small newspaper (the Washington Post) in a quest to give facts and depth to our understanding of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers would be a resounding encouragement to good investigative journalism. And the movie ends (with no spoiler here) with a quiet, and chilling, portrayal of the discovery of the Watergate break-in.
So, a great story, with some great acting. End of story. (Though you can find MORE of the real story in a recent New Yorker article about the connection between the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.)
A very well made but also very straight forward movie about a moving moment in newspaper publishing history. Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep are both superb-and the few scenes where it is just the two of them (like an early restaurant conversation) they are really amazing. Worth seeing just for that, if you love good acting.
But what drives the movie is a sense of justice-and a certainly pro-democracy anti-Republican kind of justice (that's a given, these days). That is-Nixon was a crook and was trying to squash the free press, and the people behind the scenes, publisher and editor, were caught in a trap because they were in many ways part of the social and political world of their subjects.
This is where the movie has real potential, trying to remind us how even newspapers are caught up in the actual net they are reporting on. Which means lots of conflicts. The screenplay starts to deal with this (the writers would insist they dealt with it thoroughly) but in fact they miss a real opportunity to talk about a huge problem of boundaries and honesty in reporting. And publishing.
What the movie turns to more convincingly is a straight up drama about the courage of a relatively small newspaper (the Washington Post) in a quest to give facts and depth to our understanding of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers would be a resounding encouragement to good investigative journalism. And the movie ends (with no spoiler here) with a quiet, and chilling, portrayal of the discovery of the Watergate break-in.
So, a great story, with some great acting. End of story. (Though you can find MORE of the real story in a recent New Yorker article about the connection between the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.)