A woman of substance | 18 January 2018

Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which dramatizes the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, doesn’t exactly push at the frontiers of storytelling. It’s told straight and in a familiar way. Here are the journalists furtively working through top-secret government papers in a smoke-choked room for the public good. (There were no empty pizza boxes in this instance, but there could have been, if you get my drift.) Here’s the government trying to stop them. Here’s the newspaper rolling off the press, and everyone clapping. And so on. But it does star Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, engaged in a kind of dance as the paper’s editor and proprietor, and you just can’t argue against Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. You can try, but it’s likely you won’t get very far. Plus, it’s a bit of a Trojan horse, as it cleverly smuggles in another film; a film about a woman coming into her own, which has to be satisfying. And is.

At the outset, the Post is a local paper of not much significance, which doesn’t suit ambitious Ben Bradlee (Hanks), who is probably best described as ‘a newspaper man’. The biggest story on their books is the upcoming wedding of Nixon’s daughter but their style reporter, Judith, has been banned because she attended the wedding of his other daughter, and was catty in print. (We never meet Judith, alas, but I did like the sound of her.) Meanwhile, Katharine Graham (Streep), who had inherited the paper after the suicide of her husband, who in turn had inherited it from Graham’s father, has yet to find her feet. She drops papers, knocks over chairs, is easily flustered. She is surrounded by men who won’t take her seriously and cut her out of conversations.