We’ve seen a lot of iterations of Steven Spielberg, from Sci-Fi Spielberg (Minority Report, War of the Worlds) to Prestige Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Lincoln) to Middlebrow Schmaltz Spielberg (The Terminal, War Horse). The Post reveals yet another Spielberg: Message Spielberg. Unlike say, Oliver Stone, we’ve rarely seen Spielberg with a bee in his bonnet, delivering a film with a clear and transparent takeaway.
The Post is Spielberg’s clear and passionate ode to the adversarial press, and not only is it a refreshing departure from his past work, it also turns out to be a good fit for his slick storytelling style. Spielberg is, at his core, a populist—a guy who wants to make crowd-pleasers so badly that his name has become synonymous with them. That means he tends not to leave much to the imagination. You don’t have to guess what he’s thinking, because he tells you. Without a lot of wasted motion in his storytelling, it becomes painfully obvious when he doesn’t have much to say (War Horse again, sorry to harp on this).
With The Post, Spielberg’s skills are put to a purpose: Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the chain-smoking, gray-suited editor of the Washington Post. Hanks is the perfect choice for a character who’s juuust enough of a salty old sumbitch to keep things from turning into mushy hagiography. In one of the first scenes, Bradlee tells Katharine “Kay” Graham—the owner of the newspaper, played by grand dame of cinema Meryl Streep—to “keep your finger out of my eye.”