‘Cosy competency porn’: why The Post is my feelgood movie
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- The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg, was developed at extraordinary speed: he read Liz Hannah's spec script in February 2017 and had the film in cinemas by December, a pace so tight that composer John Williams recorded the score without Spielberg having heard a note in advance.
- Spielberg cast Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks alongside character actors including Jesse Plemons and Matthew Rhys, with Nixon rendered as a shadowy villain voiced by the former president's own archive tapes.
- The $50m film follows the Washington Post's handling of the Pentagon Papers; Spielberg described it as 'a chase film with journalists,' and its final scene leads into the events of Alan J Pakula's 1976 All the President's Men.
- New York Times staffers were 'furious' at the film's minimization of their paper's role in the original scoop, with one saying 'I've been so pissed off' and another calling it '[a] stupid project.'
- Producer Amy Pascal originally acquired the Graham story in 2016 intending to time its release with Hillary Clinton's looming election victory — a plan undone by the 2016 result.
- The review notes the film's pro-journalism optimism proved short-lived: five years on, Deadline declared 'Journalists aren't as interesting as they think they are' while dissecting the box office of She Said.
- The author frames the whole project as a relic of an era when 'Steven Spielberg could get a $50m drama greenlit on a whim' and asks whether modern audiences would still accept journalists as the unambiguous good guys.
Why it matters: The review frames The Post as a 2017 high-water mark for pro-journalism Hollywood drama — a $50m adult feature that the author now reads as a time capsule. Within five years of its release, Deadline was declaring 'Journalists aren't as interesting as they think they are' about She Said, and the piece implicitly asks whether that cultural shift has closed the door on the kind of mainstream, star-driven press-celebration Spielberg delivered.
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