[8.3/10] *The Post* anchors itself around one central decision – whether or not to publish the Pentagon Papers. The sharpest thing that director Steven Spielberg and company pull of in the film is setting up the different, opposing arguments and impulses and considerations that hinge on that decision. Ninety percent of the movie is establishing each of those, from what’s at stake personally for the main characters, to what’s at stake for the country, to what’s at stake for high minded journalistic and political and American ideals. The rest is about the aftermath, and the vindication, that cements the film’s protagonists as noble for setting on this course, when there were so many easier alternate paths available, and so many competing considerations on either side.

That decision ultimately rests in the hands of Kay Graham, the owner of the Washington Post newspaper. Graham inherited ownership of the paper, which had been in her family for generations, after her father passed it on to her husband, and her husband committed suicide. It is a position that, given her gender and upbringing, she never expected to be in, a point which *The Post* repeatedly emphasizes.
That provides the film with its key theme, arc, and point. Make no mistake, Spielberg and his team are interested in the hard-knuckled challenges to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War and the intersection of journalism and commerce and political convenience. But the movie’s chief interest is in Kay and her arc of quiet strength.

She goes from being the person who psyches herself up to speak to the men in suits who outnumber her twenty to one, and yet shrinks when the spotlight is on her, to being the person who tells her board members to get in line or get out, albeit with well-mannered grace. She goes from being the person who defers to her (exclusively male) advisors about what to do because she’s unsure of her own instincts and concerned about contradicting them, to being the person who tells her team “let’s go” when the tension is high and it’s her call.

It’s a canny choice, because it puts the film on Meryl Streep’s shoulders. *The Post* is a fairly standard prestige picture, that allows its performers to go nuts with local dialects and bouts of staring off into the middle distance and big monologues about What All This Means:tm:. It’s rife with the tics and tropes that help position seasoned actors for plaudits come awards season.

Streep contends with her fair share of those things but makes them work better than anyone else in the film’s stacked cast. (Seriously, in addition to headliners Streep and Tom Hanks, *The Post* rounds out its cast with a representative from nearly every great T.V. show of the last twenty years.) Streep finds the uncertain humanity in Graham, giving her speeches stops and starts, freezing up in the right moment, evincing vulnerability and strength in equal measure when she has to that makes her character feel real and three-dimensional beyond the film’s typical Oscar season affect. For a film that hinges on a grand decision, Streep imbues the character making it with enough dimension, enough truth in her performance, to make us care about the person, and not just about the larger consequences.

That’s also how *The Post* earns its feminist bona fides. As much as it centers on Graham’s personal arc from vacillation to conviction, it also takes pains to note the ways in which she is marginalized, made invisible, talked over and condescended to because of her gender. The trajectory of the film is one of people constantly pushing her aside with barely-veiled sexist subtext, until she grabs onto her principles and pushes back, in a victory that is not just a personal one for her, but which inspires others in her circle and far beyond it.

The problem with this, and frankly, with all the film’s messaging, is that *The Post* sets up these turns and ideas nicely through action, but then becomes very heavy-handed in making sure the audience gets the point. It’s not enough for Streep’s performance and Graham’s decision to convey that Kay showed particular courage given her gender; her editor’s wife has to give an on-the-nose monologue outright stating it. It’s not enough for the interactions between journalists and politicians to communicate an uncomfortable, longstanding coziness between them Tom Hanks has to give an Oscar reel speech about it. It’s not enough for a coy line of dialogue to suggest that this effort laid the groundwork for the journalistic investigations that brought down Nixon; *The Post* has to end with what feels like a full-on, Marvel-style tease for *All the President’s Men*.

Even if *The Post* gilds the lily a bit too in that regard, it still succeeds by taking the time (in ways subtle and equally thundering) to establish all the interests and threats and risks that rest with the choice to publish these documents or not. If the movie has a key secondary theme beyond Kay’s personal, feminist journey, it’s one of access politics.

It makes the argument, through Kay’s friendship with the former Secretary who commissioned the report at issue, and her and her editor’s relationships with LBJ and JFK, that these cocktail party/vacation house relationships in polite society dampened the newspaper’s appetite for genuinely raking muck and pursuing the public good. Again, it’s not subtle, but Kay’s choice is as much one to do what’s right despite her personal friendship with the political figure at issue, in a way that stands in for a larger principled (if semi-imagined) sea-change for journalists to draw a sharper line between their friends and their sources.

Throughout the film, it touches on the other opposing forces on either side of this decision. Kay wants to honor the journalistic mission of the Post but doesn’t want to do anything that would spook investors and ruin the newspaper financially. There’s a desire to serve the public by reporting what it has a right to know, with the risk that this news could result in severe legal sanctions, or heaven forbid, threaten American lives.

There is a hope to be able to compete and make a name for the paper against the Behemoth at the New York Times, while hoping for journalistic unity when the Nixon Administration threatens the foundations of the First Amendment Freedom of the Press (replete with a Tricky Dick stand-in gesticulating while ominous music plays). There is an impulse from Kay to stand up for her newsmen and reporters, while also a concern about not doing anything to hurt this institution that she wants to exist for her children and grandchildren. For a movie that places so much importance on a single decision, it earns that by freighting Kay’s dilemma with so many factors on so many sides.

Despite that good setup, *The Post* verges on the usual Awards Season hagiography and back-patting at times. The good guys win; they make the correct, principled decisions despite ample pressures to take the easy way out, and the universe rewards them for it with teary-eyed monologues and smiling victory laps. It’s also a film that speaks to the current political moment, to the importance of a probing, inquisitive, independent press, without ever making the commentary explicit.

But even apart from that high-principled point, it is a love letter to newspapers. Spielberg’s camera follows the franticness of the newsroom, tracking characters from room to room and argument to argument as the controlled chaos of breaking the story is allowed to unfold. As in *Schindler’s List*, he follows the machinery of the institution he’s shining his light on, with plenty of moments spent on the typesetting, the organization and production, the many hands typing and printing and delivering that make the broadsheets that changed the tenor of a war and maybe a country into the finished products casually tossed into the streets.

It’s a machine overseen by a woman who rose to the moment before her, balanced and measured the points and pressures on either side of the equation, and found the strength to do what was right. That’s a familiar type of story come Oscar season, but under Spielberg’s direction and led by Streep’s performance, it’s still a damn good one.

As a male person born in 1995, there is a somewhat familiar but alienating taste in my mouth after having watched The Post.

It talks about a cover-up that spanned across 4 U.S. administrations on the Vietnam War from 1955 to 1975.

But it isn’t quite so simple, the picture is rich with messages about progressiveness and moral, it shows how close the past is to reality today and it tries to refreshen our minds that all of which we’re seeing it’s all in the past but still present today in some form.

There is a duality to the message the story is trying to convey, which are inevitably intertwined and follow a logical and factual climax that starts and ends at the same place and at the same pace. It is a beautiful crafted evolution that depicts real life events of different natures but of same spirit.
 
 The first part is freedom of the press, now, I don’t suppose to compare what reality was like back then, to today, because to my knowledge in actuality there are no such, evident problems. Today we face a different beast. Then the government scared newspapers into not publishing facts, today the government just buys newspapers so they can do their bidding. I do not presume to know how today is going to end, but I know that in this movie The Washington Post faced all odds and jumped inside an unprecedented pool of political heat. It showed that a government cannot hide from it’s population and that certain people are going to make sure every story is true and covered, regardless of the consequences because truth is what matters, nobody in charge can or should make decisions for everyone on its own, be it a person or a government.

The second part is about female empowerment. It talks about women, in particular Kay Graham, the first female newspaper publisher who struggles to overcome years of “unfair normality”, where women aren’t supposed to do such things as owning a newspaper. It so beautifully depicts how she’s lost amidst a sea of unknown and uncertainty, her inability to speak loudly because her subconscious forces her to think she doesn’t matter. Until a point where she realizes the power in her hands, something she had all along and the will she has to take her needs and wants into her own hands and decide for herself with courage and focus. This all sounds like textbook, but let me tell you something this movie doesn’t do wrong, it doesn’t just “blame men” and society altogether, not entirely, it makes clear that because of society and the way it was shaped back then, most women did not think AT ALL of what more they could do if only they wanted to, they were just happy to have the life they had, like Meryl Streep’s character said. I think this is very important to note because it doesn’t always have to be about hate between person and society or sex against sex, it can just be an individuality message to everyone, to think more about who you are and what can you do and why you should do it, if you should do it.

This duobus is enveloped in finely crafted cinematography that primarily directs at visual keys that extrudes passion and life out of the film, which is what Steven Spielberg excels at. Most noticeable of these are: the way the camera is on close-up shots at the printing machine, showing how newspapers used to be made, showing key words for the story on the letter casts and consecutively when the printing starts the desks in the news room shake holding an abstract sense of relentless fortitude and accomplishment, the glow the view acquires at the end of the movie which hymned at a brighter tomorrow, putting an end to a steep trail.

I must admit. I have not idea about how much of the movie is actual to the facts of what really happened back then and how much isn’t, the core message is there and it’s clear to everyone, the details might have gone to a storytelling side of things, some might have been lost but one thing is certain, this movie has done a marvelous job at portraying two of the biggest problems society still is enduring as of today, which in a sense is a little scary and if I really think about it, it makes me feel like I felt when I first saw 1976 Network’s speech Howard Beale made about American society’s anger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug

On Twitter I review the world -> @WiseMMO

The movie is very interesting and clearly very curated in the cast and scenography. It tells an important piece of American history and is an ode to press freedom.

However, I found it rather slow in development and a bit too lost in too many conversations. Lacks a bit of action/movement.

Firing on all Oscar-bait cylinders, _The Post_ is much more about the facts of the events than an insight into the people involved in them. It has some laughs in it, but it's far from a comedy.

It's all "what" and no "why", but also, _The Post_ is built on this HUGE will-they-wont-they question with massive ramifications ("Will Nixon and LBJ be exposed") and it's what the whole 108 minute runtime is building up to, but... We already know. The things that happen in _The Post_ are real events that are common knowledge. So it's kind of... The mystery of the moral quandary was answered before you ever pressed play. I think with the state of journalism and even more so the state of politics the way it is now in America, that _The Post_ was a very timely film, and with a cast like this assembled, obviously nobody in it is bad.

But does _The Post_ deserve the awards consideration it has gotten? Personally, I don't think it does.

_Final rating:★★½ - Not quite for me, but I definitely get the appeal._

**An ambitious film, very solid and with a lot of quality, but which turned out to be forgettable.**

I've honestly lost count of the movies about Nixon I've seen. And I understand that! In the history of the American presidential institution, few presidents have stirred up as much controversy. He was a president who not only was willing to use his whole power, but also who abused from its use. And the media was one of his biggest and most fearsome enemies. In this film, the point of originality is that the focus is never Nixon or Watergate, but the main figures of The Washington Post in the days before the scandal, when it was sued by the White House. It's not that kind of surprising originality, but it's enough.

The script has its flaws, one of which is perhaps the attempt to insert the theme of gender equality in a corporate environment. This appears when we see all those men who are very hesitant about taking orders from a woman, even though she is undoubtedly the boss and owner of the company. The 70s were important for the feminist movement, but it was a young and rebellious layer that led the decade, and the role of mature women, like the owner of the Post, may not have been valued as it should have been. However, the theme seems to be lefting in the film, and it ends up frankly underdeveloped from the moment when she basically says “the newspaper is mine, I am the one who gives orders and I answer for them, and whoever does not want to obey can leave”. This strong attitude simply closes the matter. As for factual accuracy, I'm not the best person to talk, I can't say if the film does justice to the events.

The strongest point of this film is, without a doubt, the talent gathering. Steven Spielberg ensures an impeccable direction and manages to give us a solid film, which will always, however, be a considerably minor work in his filmography. In addition, we still have a cast of cast-iron strong actors, led by Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. And I don't think I need to say that this film isn't a particularly memorable piece of work for either of them. Perhaps, the film represented a good financial fit for them, just as it certainly represented a privilege for the rest of the cast, who had the opportunity to see them work and, eventually, learn something more, some of those things that are not learned in dramatization courses, but through practical experience.

Technically, it's a pleasantly warm film. That third cup of tea that waited too long in the pot and ended up colder, but also thicker. It's the best metaphor to let you understand what I think: the environment and the theme give it density and tension, which, however, does not make it unnerving because it is done in a very moderate way, served cold. There is a period re-enactment effort that looks good, but it was necessary and could not be ignored. The soundtrack, by Williams, is forgettable, not to say mediocre (taking into account the composer's ability). There is a certain ambition in the project. The producers knew they were making a strong film, but the final product was not as good as they would have liked, nor was it memorable.