2017 - THE POST, another late period Steven Spielberg film

The days of Spielberg making Indiana Jones adventure films  have been over for a while.  Towards the later part of his career he has been concentrating on more intimate chamber pieces.  As intimate as Spielberg can get anyway.  The Post is Spielberg's tribute to the nation's free press.  The heroic publisher and journalists of the Washington Post defy the White House and publish The Pentagon Papers which were a major criticism of the Vietnam war.  The only problem with this film is that the New York Times had already printed this story a while ago after three months of investigation.  The Washington Post for the most part was basically rewriting the story for their readers as they tried to play catch up.  But you would never know it from the point of view of this film.

The Post is actually kind of a boring film. It's hard to make reporters sitting at their desks typing stories interesting.  At times Spielberg races the camera around the newsroom to get some action into the film.  This the approach Lewis Milestone took in his version of The Front Page, another newspaper story.  The only problem is Milestone's film came out in 1931, so we were hardly treading new ground here. It doesn't help matters that the photography is so dingy and dark (courtesy of Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński) at times you can hardly see what's going on.  I kept worrying the actors were going to bump into the furniture it was so gloomy.

 

The Post has a good cast since it's a Spielberg film after all.  Tom Hanks is tough guy editor Ben Bradlee.  Bradlee was a legendary figure in the newspaper world and while Hanks is okay, his mister tough guy editor can't really compete with Jason Robards Jr.'s portrayal in All The Presidents Men.  Meryl Streep is the publisher Katherine Graham, a society matron who had the job of publisher thrust on her after her husband died.  Streep's performance is not very interesting.  It's just Meryl wearing a lot of ugly early 70's clothes and hairstyles as she gives her usual phone it in performance. 

 

The Post was kind of recognized as a film taking a shot at Donald Trump at the time of its release.  If this is true, Spielberg and the gang really didn't get this across.  Maybe an approach like the one Costa-Gavras took for his political thriller Z would have worked better, now that was an exciting film.

The film was written by Josh Singer and Liz Hannah, the running time is 116 minutes.