“the post” movie review

With the free press being threatened daily by the current administration, The Post is, hands down, the most timely, relevant and important movie of the year.

The true story behind the Pentagon Papers and the government’s attempt to keep them from the public, The Post belongs in that empowering genre of movies about game-changing investigative reporting, like Spotlight and All the President’s Men.

Meryl Streep is inspiring, as always, as Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and Tom Hanks shines as editor Ben Bradlee.

The basic plot — in case, like me, you don’t remember the events of 1971 — is that the New York Times broke the story about a massive cover-up of classified government information which proved that the Vietnam War was unwinnable even while we continued to send our soldiers to fight.

Claiming this exposure was a threat to national security, Nixon’s White House pulled out the legal guns and issued a stop order. It was then up to the Washington Post to decide whether to pick up the baton and continue to print these documents.

And that’s where the story becomes more nail-biting than any action film.

The stakes are, of course, highest for Graham, who stands to go to jail and lose the newspaper that was her father and late husband’s legacy.

Watching Graham grow from publisher-in-title-only to a confident woman making a decision that has the power to affect an entire country is thrilling. Streep’s performance is so layered, you can actually feel her changing. It’s why she’s already been nominated for a Golden Globe award and is a frontrunner for an Oscar nomination.

Steven Spielberg has directed a love letter to the free press, and every single American should see this movie to understand just how fragile that “right” actually is. Back in the ’70s, the Supreme Court upheld that right but would you bet that would happen again today?

Go see The Post, get energized and keep persisting so future movies don’t have a different ending.