Don't miss The Post

There is a moment about halfway through The Post, Steven Spielberg’s timely film about US government corruption, that brought a warm glow of nostalgia. Bob Odenkirk as Washington Post journalist Ben Bagdikian is sitting at a typewriter – ask your parents, kids – banging out some notes on the biggest story of his career. Suddenly ripples appear on the surface of a glass of water on his desk. Spielberg is referencing the scene in Jurassic Park where the ripples betoken danger and the arrival of a T. Rex; here the ripples indicate something much more positive and it made me smile.

I have been in that position. Hammering away and noticing, almost subconsciously, the low bass thrumming resonating through the building. It means that the presses are running, the edition is on its way, and – depending on the time – all is well with the world. My experience of watching The Post is coloured by my real-world recollection of starting in journalism at the last knockings of the hot metal era, when reporters were ink-stained, and frequently nicotine-stained, from the practice of their craft.

Spielberg holds that era up as a golden age of American journalism in which the media was able to hold government to account in a way that it hasn’t really done since. This is the story about the birth of a great piece of journalism and with it the arrival of a great newspaper.

The so-called ‘Pentagon Papers’ were a history of America’s involvement in Indo-China over a thirty-year period. They were a vanity project of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) who wanted future historians to have an account of their rationale. However, when they were discovered by a young defence analyst, Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), he realised the papers were in fact a systemic catalogue of how the government had lied to the American people and in the process accounted for thousands of deaths.

The New York Times started running excerpts from the Papers in 1971 but fell foul of the government who won an injunction against the paper. They then fell into the hands of The Washington Post who had to decide whether to publish or not. If they published, then they ran the risk of everyone involved going to jail and the paper shutting down. A decision has to be made.

The two people at the heart of the decision are Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), a buccaneering publish and be damned old school newspaperman and Katharine Graham, (Meryl Streep) the owner of the newspaper. Full disclosure, it was hero worship for Bradlee that led me to journalism in the first place, so I find it hard to be objective. Let’s just say that Hanks portrays Bradlee as I would like to see him played.

Graham’s story is more interesting, and the film does well to make this film about her. Both were intimately connected Washington insiders; Graham was a prominent socialite and hostess, Bradlee was a former pal of JFK with all that entailed. Graham however has more to lose.

She is very much a woman in a man’s world taking on a role she was never meant to have. She had to step up after the suicide of her husband who ran the paper wit some panache and there is an implicit feeling that she isn’t up to it. Counselled by Bradlee she must decide what to do – a vital share issue on the horizon also complicates things from a financial point of view.

In the end, the decision is hers to make and she makes it and, in the process, changes the course of history. Writers Liz Hannah and Josh Singer wisely introduce a ticking clock scenario to give the story a sense of drama; the result is a film which is a lot pacier than you expect it to be and there are moments of genuine tension.

Streep and Hanks are both very good and there is a quality supporting cast. Inevitably there are one or two over-indulgent speeches about the role of the press and the importance of freedom and this is perhaps forgivable in a film which feels the hand of history on its shoulder.

Nonetheless The Post manages to remain a film and not a civics lesson. It goes about its business crisply, intelligently, and entertainingly for a decent two hours at the movies. Then at the end there is the surprise and joy that comes from the realisation that, good and all as it is, The Post is really a prequel to Alan Pakula’s riveting All the President’s Men (1976)