By Sandra Hall
★★★★
(M) General release (116 minutes)
Steven Spielberg has no time for the theory that famous people are best portrayed by relatively unknown actors who come to the role without evoking echoes of their past triumphs.
He clearly believes that stars are stars because they can bend any role to their will with the power of their personalities and the quality of their craftsmanship – which brings us to Meryl Streep.
Spielberg has cast her as Katharine Graham, the revered owner and publisher of The Washington Post, and again she has proved his point. Let's start with the look. The smoothly back-combed hair and the clothes – a carefully calibrated combination of the feminine and the businesslike – are impeccably accurate. And so is the East Coast accent, with its hint of a drawl and its undercurrents of humour and self-deprecation. Then there's the diffidence, which may seem overdone but from all accounts, modesty was a Graham hallmark. She was diffident until suddenly, she wasn't.
Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham in a scene from The Post.Credit: Niko Tavernise
She had her detractors. The most vociferous was Deborah Davis, author of Katharine the Great, an unauthorised biography that was pulped in 1979 after Graham and The Post's editor, Ben Bradlee, complained of its perceived inaccuracies. Seeing this as a clear case of censorship, Davis sued and won and the book was re-published in 1984 to mixed reviews, some of which cited a lack of documentation.
None of this is canvassed in Steven Spielberg's film, which concentrates instead on one of Graham's most courageous acts – her decision to back Bradlee in his determination to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. The whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, had gone to The New York Times first but after the initial extracts appeared, a federal court banned the paper from going any further. Guessing that Ellsberg was the source, a Post reporter collected another copy from him. Graham was then faced with a dilemma: should she risk publication even though a prosecution could send her to jail as well as scuttling her plans to take the Post's parent company public? Or should she say no, knowing that this would be read as a cowardice and completely alienate her news staff?
What happens next is a rehearsal for The Post's Watergate expose and it's all the more tantalising because we have the advantage of hindsight – unlike the main players.
As Bradlee, we have Tom Hanks, another safe if unimaginative choice. The typical Hanks hero is decent, competent, wise and reluctant. Bradlee, on the other hand, is said to have loved the limelight, treating his newsroom as both audience and orchestra.
Meryl Streep was cast as Katharine Graham, the revered owner and publisher of The Washington Post, by director Steven Spielberg.Credit: Niko Tavernise
Hanks just about gets there. The voice is perfect and so is the tempo of his performance. His Bradlee is so fast-moving that he disturbs the air whenever he enters a room. You can see why he's unable to rest in the knowledge that The New York Times is scooping the The Post on something very big.
The film is also a tribute to the days of the typewriter, the Xerox machine and hard copy. The Post newsroom is as authentic-looking as it was in All the President's Men but much of the action takes place in the cosily domestic atmosphere of the Bradlee living room. Here he has gathered a team of reporters to sort through the Papers that have arrived as a mound of pages, most of them unnumbered. And while they work, a group of lawyers in the room next door mount an argument for delaying publication. This is the climate in which Graham must make her decision.
Although the film was conceived well before the Trump presidency, it's inevitably been seen as a comment on his war against the media but it also puts a spotlight on a journalistic conflict much closer to home. Both Graham and Bradlee operated at the fulcrum of power in Washington. He had been a trusted friend of John Kennedy and the Pentagon Papers reflected badly on the Kennedy administration, while Graham was close to both Kissinger and Robert McNamara, the former Defence Secretary who had commissioned the Papers. The conversations that centre on this point are at the heart of the film, which is timely, timeless and utterly enthralling.