Film: The Post, The President and the press.

Once upon a time, there was an angry president of the USA who tried to gag the critical press. Steven Spielberg tells a story from 1971 but nobody will fail to recognize its contemporary relevance.

The Post is Steven Spielberg’s prequel to All the President’s Men. That famous political thriller by Alan J. Pakula dramatizes how Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, journalists at The Washington Post, uncovered the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon. That was in 1972.

Spielberg dramatizes how that American newspaper reinvented itself a year earlier by breaking with the old habit of trying to ingratiate themselves with the government and to start taking its role as a guardian of democracy seriously. The turning point came when the Nixon administration issued a gag order against The Post’s big brother The New York Times through the courts.

The renowned newspaper had obtained internal government documents known as the Pentagon Papers through a whistle-blower. These documents proved that various high-ranking government officials had known for a long time that it was impossible for the USA to win the Vietnam War, but that they were keeping the fiasco silent to continue the war.

Spielberg’s film shows how The Post also gained access to the Pentagon Papers and details the internal and external struggle that preceded their publication. Editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) persists, but ultimately the decision is up to publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep). She is in the midst of preparing a stock-market flotation and is good friends with Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense who will be discredited by the Pentagon Papers.

This film lacks the paranoid, exciting, shadowy qualities of All the President’s Men. Spielberg prefers clear and entertaining plot development. Without heroizing the journalists excessively, he underscores the important role of the media and the courage and sense of duty they need when they clash with political superpowers.

It is no surprise that Spielberg is supporting the critical media right now. The current presidential bully in the US attempts to eviscerate his critics in the media on a daily basis. To your posts!

> The Post. US, dir.: Steven Spielberg, act.: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk