First draft

The Post

Crit

This is probably not the first Spielberg review I've begun this way, but: what hokum! What terrific hokum!

Of course, my hokum tolerance is particularly high for a newspaper movie, especially one that shows a few of those poetic sequences of the press running, printing and cutting and folding the first draft of history. I watched (but did not blog) All the President's Men again recently, and this one did something to me that even that one can't do: it made me imagine that maybe I should have stayed in the biz. Which is ridiculous, of course: I was less the guy with sources for government secrets than the guy who knew which intern (we called 'em scoretakers) would make the fastest chicken & biscuits run to Popeye's and get back with the right change.

What I did not realize coming in: the extent to which the trial of Katharine Graham (Oscar-ready Meryl Streep) would be not merely to overcome the drawback of being female in the eyes of all the men advising her but to overcome that felt shortcoming in her own eyes. It's painful forty-seven years after 1971 to see a woman with so much de jure power so meek and tentative about turning it de facto. Which of course makes it that much more triumphant (Spielbergian, one might say) when she finally declares the institution she has always loved to be no longer her father's or her husband's but her paper.