For this feature, Streep plays Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), a publisher who led The Washington Post after her husband, the former owner of the paper, took his own life while Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the paper. Graham is looking to get The Washington Post's presence expanded by taking it public on the stock market while Bradlee is searching for a hot new scoop that can help his paper compete with The New York Times, which just published a number of incriminating documents that implicate the U.S. government continuing its presence in the Vietnam War, and by proxy sending thousands of young men overseas for combat, for reasons more motivated by bravado rather than actually believing they can win the war.
With Ben Bradlee's trust confidante Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) hot on the trail of a potentially big story for The Washington Post, both Graham and Bradlee's individual ambitions for the paper end up colliding in response to the White House barring The New York Times from publishing anymore leaked classified documents. The sanctity of the free press is under siege, a towering prospect that is examined through a small-scale lens in an interesting departure for Spielberg, whose films tend to be grand spectacles that span multiple countries and years. For The Post, most of it takes place in either normal or occasionally seedy locales and the events themselves take place over the course of a few days.
Going for a more intimate scale benefits the screenplay penned by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer who manage to pen an interesting tale of people who all recognize they're on the cusp of history and their responses to being in such a situation. One of the best scenes of the entire film has Ben Badikian meeting up with a source whose leaking the Pentagon Papers, the most crucial pieces of paper in the whole country, in a hotel room and instead of a grandiose score and sweeping monologues punctuating this important meeting, their exchange is fraught with tension and unease. Bagdikian is just now realizing the scope of what he's gotten into and the importance of the task at hand. He's just a normal guy but he's found himself in circumstances that are anything but normal.
It's the actions of everyday people that help the gears of history to keep on churning and The Post gets some truly fascinating cinema out of that truth. Other themes explored in The Post include the pressure and stigmas put on Kay for having to be the rare woman to lead a giant newspaper operation in this day & age as well as an intriguing concept of realizing your friends are also human beings who are as capable of being corrupt as anyone else. Both Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee have to come to terms with the fact that politicians, they were all cozy and friendly with for years may not be who they appear to be and some of the best moment of The Post come from watching these two come to terms with the more morally complex world that has been right under their noses all along.
If the script has any major structural problems, it's that Kay Graham sometimes feels like she's too much on the outskirts of important plot points. That feels intentional to a degree since she's the public face of the company while Ben Bradlee and his staffers (two of whom are played by Carrie Coon and David Cross) are explicitly shown as the little people trying to get tomorrow's headline going, but it does feel like the second act of the story could have used more of her perspective given how crucial she is to the overall plot. At least the third act somewhat compensates for this by turning the focus almost squarely onto her and allows for a number of brilliant pieces of acting from the woman portraying this film's version of Kay Graham, Meryl Streep.
Streep, here giving her best performance since Doubt in 2008, is playing a more restrained character compared to the more stylized individuals she's played in recent motion pictures. Going more subdued is a great move for her because Streep actually excels as an actor when it comes down to tiny details in her performance. Just her facial movements when she's standing in her office overhearing a crude conversation about herself speaks volumes more than words do while she's able to lend a sense of gravity and believability to the more showy moments of her performance. It's a wonderful lead turn and Tom Hanks compliments it with a surprisingly unorthodox performance for him as he plays a gruff no-nonsense guy who couldn't be more of an opposite of the kind of performances we all typically think of as default Hanks performances. An absolutely stacked supporting cast (Tracy Letts, Sarah Paulson, Bradley Whitford, Jesse Plemons and Alison Brie are all also in this) ensures that even the smallest characters get to leave some sort of impression in their screentime.
Directing all of this is, of course, Steven Spielberg. It's impressive just how thoughtful this guy's camerawork is, especially in terms of the movement of the camera and the way the camera is positioned. The way so many of the shots are utilized to convey specific themes or ideas in the tiniest details (just look for when high-angle shots are used to cleverly emphasize which character in a scene is vulnerable) may seem like something obvious & easy, but so many dialogue-heavy dramas opt for static camerawork and editing that rob their project of energy as well as the chance to be visually memorable. Spielberg's shown he can make dialogue-heavy movies visually compelling in the past with features like Lincoln or Bridge of Spies and he does that again here with The Post. Frequent Spielberg collaborator John Williams turns in an excellent score (does that guy ever miss on his scores?). As I wind down this review, it only just occurred to me now, writing about John Williams, how The Post is a movie packed with top-caliber flashy Hollywood talent both in front of and behind the camera that's so successful because it places an emphasis on the actions of everyday individuals. That may sound like a paradox to some but to me it just sounds like the formula that results in a wonderful thriller like The Post.
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