Clicked more on a second viewing, especially when I got to the shot above, in which the WaPo justice league looks at the freshly unboxed Pentagon Papers as if gazing at the Ark of the Covenant. There's no light emanating from within; the glow (of truth—"theoretically," paraphrasing one of reporter Ben Bagdikian's (Bob Odenkirk) asides) has to be projected onto the contents. Destruction, or "catastrophe," as WaPo lawyer Fritz Beebe (Tracy Letts) might say, could just as easily result. There are arguments on many sides…many sides. And this is a film of many sides (better…facets, since Spielberg excels at kinetic surfaces). Some of the imagery is so obvious in its thematic import that the meanings and modern-day parallels (such as the 20/20 hindsight feminism) could be seen from space. Mike D'Angelo has a good line in his piece about the moment when Meryl Streep's Kay Graham "walk[s] down the courthouse steps while a crowd made up exclusively of young women stare at her as if she's Athena descending Mount Olympus." He finds it pandering, and it is that. The complication for me is that I also find it poetic, inspired in the ways that only savant Steven can manage and which many other artists try (and fail at) imitating/emulating.
You can't teach this old dog new tricks. With rare exception, Spielberg believes in the best of people and their institutions, or at least in those fleeting moments of clarity that arise in worlds gone mad. And of course these ideas are envisioned via the language of movies past: When Graham is agonizing over whether or not to publish the Papers, Janusz Kaminski's camera cranes up, isolating her in her study as if she were the tormented heroine of an Ophuls or Minnelli melodrama. Sam Fuller, who once gruffly graced Spielberg's frame as a military man in 1941, informs the newsroom scenes (a porkpie-hatted copy editor and a clickety-clacking Linotype machine are treated with a reverence that recalls Park Row), while the opening Vietnam battle section that introduces military analyst-turned-whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) has a bit of The Steel Helmet about it, though with the emphasis placed on the tools of journalism as opposed to war (e.g.: the whoosh of helicopter blades seamlessly segue into Ellsberg tapping away on his typewriter). "He's observing," says one of the soldiers about this intruding "long-hair," and that's the position we as viewers are typically in—at a remove that I'm tempted to describe as dispassionate, even though Spielberg tries, time and again, as is his wont, to do some emotional goosing.
That's the source, I think, of much of the goofy discordance undulating beneath The Post, the script of which (credited to Liz Hannah and Josh Singer) Spielberg first picked up in early 2017 and quickly brought to fruition as a kind of divertissement distraction during Ready Player One's (2018) effects-heavy post-production. This is a taut procedural made by an unabashed softie who isn't above a grandstanding/hand-holding gesture. So we get that aforementioned scene of a goddess gliding down the mount, though at least it's the logical culmination of some prior visual groundwork: Graham ascending the steps of the Stock Exchange while navigating a sea of bankers's wives, their husbands lingering, like predators-in-waiting, on the other side of a towering double door. I'm less enamored of the "bravery" monologue delivered by Sarah Paulson as Tony Bradlee, artist wife to WaPo newsroom majordomo Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). It's one of several sequences (Graham's sum-it-all-up final scene is another) in which the writers and Spielberg lean too heavily into the Now, which makes the Then in front of us seem that much more bogus.
Yet there's a large degree to which Spielberg is aware of this falseness, and intentionally treads near parody as a way to complicate matters. I don't think it's an accident he contrives a Mr. Show reunion between Odenkirk and David Cross (the latter playing WaPo editor Howard Simons) and then has them barely interact even when occupying the same space. The potential to tip over into burlesque creates its own potent tensions; one glance askew, one "Who dares question Ryan Dorn?!?" to camera and the drama mask falls. This ethos is similarly evident in Hanks's broad, surly performance as Bradlee—as close to SNL as you can get while still of a piece with the actor's previous work for Spielberg (especially the righteous, thinly veiled assholes that were Catch Me If You Can's Carl Hanratty and Bridge of Spies's James Donovan)—as it is in the scenes in which a Richard Nixon stand-in (filmed only from behind and at a distance) play-acts the actual Nixon's conspiratorial phone calls. This American life: A tragedy in close-up, a comedy in long-shot (with Watergate and beyond as enduring punchline).
At heart, however, this is another of Spielberg's portraits of a benevolent capitalist (Streep's Graham, an Oskar Schindler for the ink-stained) who stumbles into doing the right thing. Her pivotal scene is the one in which she confronts family friend/former White House secretary of defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood). You know her soul aches not because of what she says, but due to the agitated way she jangles the car keys in her hand—a very Streepian affectation, though one that, in context, plays like a profound bit of Capra-corn. (Every time a bell rings, an entrepreneurial angel gets its wings.) That's not to say Spielberg is ignorant of the free market's many discards: Interns are disposable, as is the African-American security guard who stops one of them outside the layout department of WaPo rival The New York Times. Low-level reporters are brushed aside or ignored, such as the one (Michael Cyril Creighton) who fortuitously procures the first of the Pentagon Papers, then hems and haws while delivering them to a supercilious Bradlee. At the least, Spielberg makes us hyperaware of the many levels of power inherent to the fourth estate, from the empyrean boardroom, with its shafts of celestial sunlight, to the plebeian cellar, where a Moloch-like mechanical behemoth puts out all the news that's deemed trickle-down fit to print. At one point the machine, like automated kin to the Jurassic Park T-Rex, shakes the WaPo offices from top to bottom. Somewhere in-between, Odenkirk's Bagdikian jumps at the disturbance, and then gives the most sublimely subtle smile, as if to acknowledge that this is one dinosaur by which he'd gladly be devoured.
