‘The Post’ Is Somehow the Most Underrated Steven Spielberg Movie in Years

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What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: The Post
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Sarah Paulson, Carrie Coon, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie, Bradley Whitford
Available on: Amazon Prime and iTunes

It seems absurd on the surface to call The Post underrated. This is a Steven Spielberg film, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, a trio that is almost comedically composed for maximum Hollywood royalty. Maybe if you added Jack Nicholson as, like, Nixon. That’s the only way you could imagine a movie more pre-sold to the center of the Hollywood establishment. Add to that the fact that it was a Best Picture nominee, even if that was one of merely two nominations in total. But somehow, despite the star power and the timeliness of the narrative (Spielberg set out to make the film in response to Donald Trump’s attacks on the press during the first weeks of his administration) and the Best Picture citation, people really slept on The Post. They didn’t hate it, of course. The reviews were good, and the box-office tally topped $80 million domestic. But there was a pervasive lack of enthusiasm around the film. Like being a good movie was disappointing people, perhaps. Because it’s so expected. Oh, another proficiently made, impeccably acted, important-subject movie from Spielberg, ho-hum. It’s not hard to understand the impulse. In a year when the likes of Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele and Timothée Chalamet and Margot Robbie were all wowing us with films and performances we never saw coming, Steven Spielberg rounded up the two most reliable and familiar movie stars in the world and gave us a good movie. To quote one of his stars: “…groundbreaking.”

This is all more than a little maddening, though, because here’s the thing: The Post isn’t a good movie. The Post is a GREAT movie. It’s the kind of movie that we have Steven Spielbergs for. Who else could have pulled together the level of talent that’s on display in this movie on such short notice and delivered a rebuke to Trump that doesn’t feel cheap or desperate or overt. This is a film that tells a compelling story that has longed to be told, and he tells it in a way that turns a thrilling national constitutional crisis (the free press! executive overreach!) into a character drama.

While Spielberg could have cast Streep for a role that didn’t match the level of her ability, he knew better. Katharine Graham, the great and respected owner of the Washington Post, was already a towering figure over the course of her life and career. But the Kay Graham we get in The Post, one in the crucible of history, finding her voice in a hostile and male-dominated business, working her way through the thick vines of D.C. chumminess and personal relationships — this Kay Graham is the kind of character Meryl Streep very rarely gets to play. Even her recent Oscar-nominated (and Oscar-winning) roles in The Iron Lady and August: Osage County and Doubt haven’t been the platforms for the complexity and vulnerability Streep shows in The Post. More than any role she’s had since … honestly, maybe Postcards from the Edge, Streep gives up some of her legendary control. She allows Kay to feel adrift in her own story, which is honestly gripping, particularly if you’re in any way invested in Meryl Streep as a performer.

Ultimately, the story of the Pentagon Papers — the intra-governmental study commissioned by LBJ’s secretary of defense Robert McNamara to assess the effectiveness and the prospects for victory of the quagmire in Vietnam, which were leaked, initially to the New York Times in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg in an act of bravery and possible treason and which revealed that the U.S. government had lied to the American people for years about the dim prospects for success in southeast Asia — is less compelling than the story of the people who published them. (Though if you want a great movie about the Pentagon Papers, the Oscar-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is streaming on YouTube.) Instead, Spielberg delivers the most compelling office drama in years. The inner workings of Ben Bradlee’s newsroom are a churning, riveting, sometimes mundane series of events that hop from hand-wringing over the tone of coverage for the Nixon wedding to sending an intern to New York to scope out what the Times is working on. At this period in history, the Washington Post was a small-time newspaper, looking to compete with the big dogs, and in the hands of Tom Hanks, the Ben Bradlee of The Post is utterly tenacious. His and Streep’s scenes together dance right up to the line of being combative, though they clearly get along personally. It’s an old-school dynamic of well-intentioned professionals who often find themselves at cross-purposes. And since Spileberg is very interested in blowing up the dynamic of a chummy and complicit Washington press, Bradlee and Graham’s soft confrontations take on added weight.

So is the film Important? Surely. It’s also a wildly fun ride through a story that is breaking faster than the writers can keep up with it. Spielberg cast a gold mine of supporting talent here, and they all deliver. Bob Odenkirk as the lead reporter who ferrets out Ellsberg from some old connections; Matthew Rhys as Ellsberg himself; Carrie Coon and David Cross are among Bradlee’s writers; Sarah Paulson plays Bradlee’s wife, while Alison Brie is Graham’s daughter; Tracy Letts is phenomenal as Graham’s trusted aide, while Bradley Whitford fumes as her most contentious board member; Jesse Plemons and Zach Woods show up later as a pair of overmatched in-house lawyers. It’s funny that Spielberg is so dedicated to movies as cinema, because he’s assembled a real all-star team of the best actors from the last decade of television. Watching the stars of Better Call Saul, The Americans, The Leftovers, GLOW, American Horror Story, Silicon Valley, and Fargo get together to help break one of the greatest stories in American journalism history is like The Avengers for news dorks.

The virtue of almost any Steven Spielberg movie is that it goes down easy. They’re so watchable, it’s sometimes unseemly. World War I or the African slave trade or Mossad assassinations shouldn’t be this baseline watchable, we tell ourselves. But the sharp professionalism of Spielberg shouldn’t mean they’re greeted with a sigh when they don’t reinvent the genre. The Post tells an urgent story interestingly and well, and if you’re a fan of movies, it’s hard to imagine it will disappoint.

Where to stream The Post