The Post

Can a Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks-Meryl Streep team up be anything but a big, splashy wonder? The Post seems heading for the Oscars on more counts than one but that’s not the real feather in the cap of this amazing venture.

The real thing about The Post is how it manages to engross you so completely that you never find a moment to point out how utterly slow the proceedings actually are. Other than that, but most importantly, the film brings into focus the relevance of journalism in a time when it has been caricaturised by paid news, so-called product endorsing lifestyle journalism and the crippling perception about the overall needlessness of the print medium.

Based on The Washington Post’s effort to throw up the eternal corruption in the corridors of power (this time through the Vietnam saga) it has Tom Hanks in a brilliantly done role of Editor Ben Bradlee who eggs on his publisher and owner Katherine Graham (played to the hilt by the celestially gifted actress Meryl Streep) to make public the top-secret Pentagon Papers, a 47-volume, 7,000-page Department of Defence study of the war in Vietnam and all the official dirt  and lies shadowing at least four presidencies.

Bradlee, who has the onerous task of taking away the story from New York Times which breaks it, encases the brilliance of Hanks as a gripping actor and makes him look, feel and sound more real than the real Ben Bradlee. As for Streep, as the mercurial, new boss of a publishing entity weighing the pros and cons of taking on the might of the political establishment and risking the closure of her newspaper, jail and even death of her employees, she is stunning — as usual.

Spielberg, the master of cinematic excellence, gives The Post a thrilling pace which is extra-ordinary for a dialogue intensive, a slow delving true story that movie is all about.

With mega predecessors like All The President’s Men and Spotlight to contend with on the same subject, it was indeed a challenge to make The Post beat the “familiarity is contempt” blues, a challenge only a genius like Spielberg could have navigated as efficiently as he does this one.

What makes The Post rare and utterly engaging is the fact that it showcases the value of newspapers teaming up to unfold high-level deception and pinning down the Government to accountability even if the grave spectre of crippling financial pressures stares journalism down as a whole.

An excellent, relevant, meaningful, message-throwing film that fights all odds of viability with hits brilliant content, brilliantly portrayed.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 14 January, 2018