{"id":676631,"date":"2026-07-06T12:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T12:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/676631\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T12:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T12:10:10","slug":"cosy-competency-porn-why-the-post-is-my-feelgood-movie-the-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/676631\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Cosy competency porn\u2019: why The Post is my feelgood movie | The Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven Spielberg<\/a> was never much of a radical. While Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now and even George Lucas attacked the Vietnam war with Star Wars, the nervy new Hollywood hotshot was more interested in moviemaking\u2019s toys than its politics. In Peter Biskind\u2019s bestselling book of Tinseltown gossip, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the actor Kit Carson remembers running into Spielberg at a party when the tumult of an eventful 1968 presidential campaign was at fever pitch. \u201cEverybody was up,\u201d Carson remembered. \u201cThe revolution was about to happen.\u201d All the young director wanted to talk about was how to get a shot while throwing a camera off a roof.<\/p>\n

In the end, it took him 40 years to produce his own broadside against the US foreign policy of his youth. In uncharacteristically political style, he spent most of it drawing parallels to the then current resident of the White House.<\/p>\n

The Post is cosy competency porn in front of the camera and behind it. Spielberg read Liz Hannah\u2019s spec script in February 2017 after another project collapsed. By December, it was in cinemas, and while its subject is nominally the Washington Post\u2019s handling of the Pentagon Papers, its substance is one of the last full-throated hurrahs for journalists and journalism on the big screen. A boring choice for a journalist\u2019s feelgood movie? Maybe: it\u2019s like a dog explaining the merits of a pat on the head.<\/p>\n

But though it\u2019s often compared to the investigative journalist\u2019s favourite, All the President\u2019s Men (not unfairly, considering its final scene leads, MCU-like, into the events of Alan J Pakula\u2019s 1976 classic), The Post is actually a very different beast from most of its genre stablemates. Its story isn\u2019t a slow burn in pursuit of truth and justice, instead scorching shoe leather at speed as an intern sprints across Manhattan to deliver the latest scoop to the New York Times. Spielberg himself described it as \u201ca chase film with journalists\u201d; it certainly flows like one.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This is breaking news told at a breakneck pace \u2013 good people making difficult decisions while everyone screams at them to hurry the hell up. It\u2019s journalism as both public service and adrenaline hit, made more urgent by John Williams\u2019s brilliantly propulsive score; like everything in the film, it was composed at speed. The pace of production was so fast that Spielberg entered recording sessions for the score \u201chaving not heard a note<\/a>\u201d in advance.<\/p>\n

Then, an island of calm among the rapids. Meryl Streep<\/a> is effortlessly assured as a very un-assured Katharine Graham. It\u2019s a movie star performance in a role that turns the character\u2019s insecurity into her greatest weapon: her triumphant put-down of Bradley Whitford\u2019s boardroom goon (\u201cI\u2019m talking to Mr Bradlee now\u201d) is an endorphin shot straight to the brain. For all its lofty veneration of the first amendment, Spielberg doesn\u2019t forget to stuff The Post with moments like this; he\u2019s making a movie, dammit, and he\u2019ll be damned if it doesn\u2019t feel like one.<\/p>\n

The old Hollywood feel stretches to the rest of the cast, too, made up less of movie stars (Tom Hanks aside) and more an impeccably chosen gang of character actors. Under-the-radar choices like Jesse Plemons and Matthew Rhys have been vindicated a hundred times over in the years since. It even has a shadowy villain, the sinister silhouette of Richard Nixon voiced using archive tapes of the man himself.<\/p>\n

Like any good fictionalisation, though, the story (ironically) takes a few liberties with the truth. New York Times staffers were \u201cfurious\u201d at the minimisation of their paper\u2019s role in one of its biggest-ever scoops. \u201cI\u2019ve been so pissed off,\u201d said one<\/a>; \u201c[a] stupid project,\u201d harrumphed another.<\/p>\n

But The Post\u2019s selective attitude toward the truth matters less than it should. Written more as a character study of Graham than a history of the Pentagon Papers, producer Amy Pascal originally picked up<\/a> the story of a woman\u2019s leadership against the odds in 2016 to coincide with Hillary Clinton\u2019s looming election victory. The result, religiously factual or no, captured a national mood \u2013 just a different one than intended.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s optimistic take on the journalism industry seemed to die shortly after its release. Five years later, Deadline would declare \u201cJournalists aren\u2019t as interesting as they think they are\u201d<\/a> when dissecting #MeToo investigation She Said\u2019s box office woes. Spielberg may have been right to say this story had to be told as quickly as possible; would audiences today so easily believe journalists are the good guys?<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m left feeling nostalgic for, of all years, 2017: when films were movie-shaped and grown-up, when Steven Spielberg<\/a> could get a $50m drama greenlit on a whim, and when \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cthe American way\u201d could appear together outside of a punchline.<\/p>\n

A collection of world-class talents working at astonishing speed to tell a story in which time is of the essence. Could there be a better tribute to the journalistic ideal than that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steven Spielberg was never much of a radical. While Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now and even George…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-676631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}