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In 'The Post,' Streep Becomes Katharine Graham Taking Charge

In 'The Post,' Streep Plays Washington Post Publisher Katherine Graham

"The Post" is Steven Spielberg’s new film about a momentous decision to publish a secret government report and a necessary celebration of America’s free press.

For a complex understanding of the First Amendment, Steven Spielberg is probably not the ideal filmmaker. But if you want the visceral side of things, Spielberg offers a terrific sense of how freedom of the press feels, and how it may look when people grapple with it. Spielberg also is not known for making political films or taking political stands in public, yet "The Post" is a thoroughly political film, and a pointed one that goes right to the question of the necessity for a free press to keep government honest and to inform the population of actualities a government may wish to hide.

The story takes place in 1971 during the war in Vietnam. The defense department had conducted a thorough — and top secret – examination of the war, and kept it hidden. A young former Defense Department analyst who had once supported the war, but then had come to see through the layers of deception surrounding it, was working at the Rand Corporation. Daniel Ellsberg, played in the film by Matthew Rhys, secretly copied all 7,000 pages and gave them to the ace investigative reporter of The New York Times, Neil Sheehan. In June of 1971, a Sunday, the first installment of what came to be called The Pentagon Papers appeared on the front page of the Times. Within a day, the Nixon administration got a temporary injunction to stop the Times from printing more of the document, but by then The Washington Post also had the material – and the film is about the decision by the Post to publish.

Steven Spielberg, with screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, has made a potent story of a middle-aged woman taking control of her life and work. The movie opens with Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) new to the job of owner and publisher. Her father had been publisher, but he handed it over to Graham’s husband. When he died prematurely, the job fell to her. Katharine Graham is a great matron of Washington society. She knows everyone who matters, has them to dinner and charms them. She does not put her position in jeopardy with ill-mannered reporting on these gracious and powerful friends.

When she considers turning her newspaper into a public company, Graham is surrounded by men – sober advisors – who want her to make sound business decisions. They’re certain they know best, and publishing the so-called Pentagon papers will harm the stock offering. The famed executive editor of the Post, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), also knows what’s best – Graham must allow him to publish. It takes time, but slowly Streep changes her posture and the look in her face, and where she stands in each shot – and the movie becomes a story of Katharine Graham taking charge.

Steven Spielberg has an eye for physicality. The crucial order to print takes shape in Streep’s body and body language. Lots of films show information moving electronically, as if watching a computer screen is an exciting cinematic event. In "The Post," it’s visceral. The Pentagon Papers come in heavy boxes. The editor who gets them from Ellsberg has to buy a second seat on the plane. He needs help lugging them from the cab into Ben Bradlee’s house. The reporters working on the story spread the papers over an entire room and have to sort them out by page and date – by hand.

There hasn’t been a good scene of newspaper manufacture in decades. Graham says “Print,” and the massive industrial process begins. This is no virtual event, nothing fantasized in the nowhere of the cyber world. Hot lead is shaped into letters, then blocks of type set by hand. The presses roll. A cup on a reporter’s desk upstairs trembles, because newspaper presses really did shake buildings. The printed paper takes shape and flies overhead. Actual human beings load stacks of papers on trucks and others collect them as the truckers toss them to newsstands. It feels momentous and real – because it was.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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