[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.