Pure cinematic pedigree in The Post

IF pure cinematic pedigree counts for anything these days, then The Post just has to be the best-bred movie to happen along in a long time.

THE POST (M)

Rating: four stars (4 out of 5)

Director: Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies)

Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Bob Odenkirk.

Knowledge is power. But who has control of the on/off switch?

IF pure cinematic pedigree counts for anything these days, then The Post just has to be the best-bred movie to happen along in a long time.

Front and centre you have two of the finest lead actors still active in mainstream Hollywood: Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. Incredibly, this decorated and deservedly popular pair have never appeared together on screen before.

As you would expect, both rise to the occasion and are in wonderful form in their respective roles.

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Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham. Picture: AP

Further boosting the gilt-edged prospects of The Post is the presence of the most successful filmmaker in motion-picture history, Steven Spielberg, in the director’s chair.

Again, viewers are quite within their rights to expect nothing but the best from Spielberg, and he has responded with one of the finest works of this “final” phase of his long career.

Remarkably, the usually meticulous and painstaking Spielberg started and finished The Post inside a six-month production period last year.

Such was his belief (and that of his cast and crew) that the project bore a hot-button relevance to the volatile state of play in American politics right now that needed to be pressed home immediately.

Though The Post is set largely in the early 1970s, its core concerns about the lengths a government will take to lie to the public — and the measures the media should take to preserve and propagate the truth — could not be any more contemporary.

Spielberg started and finished The Post inside a six-month production period last year.

A long, involving and inspiring story begins with Daniel Ellsberg (played by Matthew Rhys), a veteran military analyst who covertly distributes a top-secret report that proves America’s ongoing military interventions in far-flung locales such as Vietnam have been a catastrophic failure.

The report came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and US President Richard Nixon and his stalwart Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) used all of the powers at their disposal to stop its contentious contents reaching American citizens.

The New York Times was the first paper to break news of this devastating expose before US courts threatened them with treason under the Espionage Act.

However, all the heavy lifting required to drag the full ugliness of the Pentagon Papers into the public spotlight fell to what was then a much smaller media outlet, The Washington Post.

The decision to print the Pentagon Papers fell to inexperienced publisher, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep).

In 1971, this newspaper hardly seemed up to the onerous (and times, downright dangerous) task opportunistically set down by managing editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks).

The staff of The Washington Post was certainly willing enough to give it a crack, but the final say on whether to print or suppress the full magnitude of the Pentagon Papers controversy fell to its inexperienced publisher, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep).

Having taken on her position in tragic circumstances, Graham had a number of good business reasons to let the story die.

However, the dramatic ethical import of what The Pentagon Papers represented was never lost on Graham.

Slowly, but surely, she answers the call of her conscience, becoming the public face of a defiant stand that has since become legendary in the annals of investigative journalism.

@leighpaatsch

Originally published as Pure cinematic pedigree in The Post