Review: The Post

Is there a movie Tom Hanks has been in that truly stank? I don't pretend to encyclopedic knowledge of his career, but I expect a lot of people might point at Forrest Gump as one. And as much as I enjoyed that film, there could be an argument for such a low rating: it's schmaltz married to some very slick (for the era) CGI, conjured up from an impenetrable, windy novel.

But you would have to press harder, in my estimation. In any case, I'm in no mood to search for examples, coming down as I am off the high of watching Hanks and Meryl Streep chase down Nixon in The Post. Streep, playing the role of publisher Katherine Graham, has only recently taken on that role (as we learn, following her husband's suicide), and needs an infusion of cash from Wall Street to expand what had been a sleepy regional paper. Hanks, as editor Ben Bradlee, gets down the grizzled J. Jonah Jameson act with aplomb and not a little parrying with Graham. The principal actors of the Post, you see, have personal connections to power: Graham knew Robert McNamara, who commissioned the Pentagon Papers and then suppressed them, as a close personal friend and someone with deep ties to her board of directors. Bradlee went drinking with the Kennedys and Johnsons.

These conflicts of interest form the nucleus of the film's drama when Daniel Ellsburg, a former employee of the RAND Corporation, secretly copies and sends to the New York Times McNamara's study. Comprising a history of lies through multiple administrations dating back to Truman, the material makes plain the deceit behind the folly of Vietnam. The Post gets a copy of some of the pages. but before they can publish, the Times scoops them again. Nixon sues the Times and for a time silences that paper. Then Ellsburg slips Post reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) a (partial?) copy of the papers — and the tension builds. Does Graham want to publish and invite the wrath of Nixon? What about the institutional investors? If they get buyer's remorse in the week following the offering, the whole deal is cancelled, and the Post is in deep financial trouble.

Of course you know that Bradlee and Graham won the showdown with Nixon, and got an ironclad First Amendment pillar, New York Times Corp. v. United States, written into the Supreme Court's legacy of press freedom. For Oscars voters, it is convenient that Nixon was who he was, and Team Blue largely (if unevenly) sat on the opposite corner. But many partisans must still be reminded that corporations do in fact have First Amendment rights, and that the Obama administration prosecuted and jailed more leakers than any other administration in history under the Espionage Act. If this movie is meant to rhyme with our own Trumpian era, it has a little catching up to do with the previous administration first.