News is the first rough draft of history
My daughter kept telling me “it’s definitely your kind of movie” talking about The Post. Now that I’ve seen it, I think she meant my kind of story.
If that’s what she meant, she is absolutely correct. The movie actually tells two great stories - both of them my kind of story. Both stories are also very timely. We need to hear these stories in today’s political and social climate. If you ask me, though, the movie was not spectacular. Perhaps worthy of a best picture nomination, perhaps not.
So, let’s focus on the stories.
It’s a story about moral decisions The Post’s screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer - Vox
The characters in the film are asked to make decision after decision - sometimes between two “wrong” options, sometimes between two “right” options - but in the end it all comes down to the choice of risking everything in the name of what one believes in.
In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.
That alone makes it a great story, but there is another story told that is, if you ask me, just as timely - a woman standing up to men.
I’m talking to Mr. Bradlee now!
This is probably my favorite quote from the film. I just love the way Katharine Graham stopped the interrupter in his tracks. I went online in search of the actual quote to be sure I remembered it correctly, and while doing so I found a really good explanation of the way Graham’s character was portrayed in the film - and what I really liked about this scene and others like it. The author of the quote below explains it better than I could.
There are so many instances of how she went from a goody-two shoes, an oh-dear, oh-dear, pearl necklace-clutching neophyte who would allow men to talk over her in board meetings, to being able to command the room and confidently state that she’s made ‘the decision’ and that is that (“And I’m off to bed,” she says at the end of one scene in the movie, my favourite one, I think). In that scene, her tone doesn’t waver when she proclaims after hearing out all the flustered men, “I’m talking to Mr Bradlee now!”, shutting up annoying management types sniping at her ankles, about how the company would go bust and investors would flee if Mrs Graham went ahead and published the Pentagon Papers. I know I was cheering for her. So many women in real time — and men! (let’s not paint them all with the same brush) — must have been. Katharine Graham, the woman who had the “guts of a burglar”
A must see film that tells stories that need to be told. It might actually win best picture, but I think there are better contenders this year.