FILM IN REVIEW

1 7 9 R F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R As the Washington Post reporter Ben Bagdikian in Steven Spielberg ’s The Post, Bob Odenkirk wears dress shirts that are not quite white and not quite beige, not quite green and not quite yellow. Instead, they’re a muted and sickly combination of all four, the color of drapes in a rented room in which you pray never to live. And they fit right in with the rest of Bagdikian’s ensemble. When he’s calling a confidential source from an out-of-the-way pay phone, you can see the trousers of his brown suit (would he wear any other color?) puddling at his ankles. Bagdikian’s sartorial choices are matched by the others on display in the Post newsroom , like the striped short-sleeve dress shirts and defiantly unmatching ties of managing editor Howard Simons (David Cross), half of which seem to be forever hanging out of his trousers. The costumes for The Post are the work of the eighty-six-year-old Ann Roth, the best American costume designer since Edith Head. Roth’s great taste has always expressed itself in her instinctive talent for melding the traits of character with the physical particulars of actors. It’s unlikely any artist of Roth’s stature has ever devoted the loving attention she does here to the ill-dressed American male. And this blithe schlumpiness is essential to the movie’s 1 8 0 T A Y L O R Y appeal. The Post turns out to be about how our civic and political and journalistic traditions, which so often seem to exist on high, detached from our everyday existence, are given life by the rumpled actions of rumpled people. It’s about treating the Bill of Rights as living law and not entombed history. The movie opens in 1971, when the Washington Post was still thought of as a regional paper, not having the weight of its local competitors, let alone the New York Times. The owner and publisher is Katharine Graham, who had taken over the paper in 1963 when her husband, the publisher Philip Graham, committed suicide . (The Post had been in Mrs. Graham’s family for years; when her father retired in the mid-1940s, he put his son-in-law in charge.) The paper is strapped for cash, and Mrs. Graham, played here by Meryl Streep, is about to take it public. She’s being coached on how to sell the public o√ering to her dubious executive board, and Streep’s line readings of the canned justifications that have been written for Graham suggest the anxiety straining beneath the mien of public composure. You can hear a slight breathlessness in the measured voice Streep uses here, even in her early scenes with her headstrong and charmingly arrogant executive editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). She’s his boss (Graham hired Bradlee), and yet, in a breakfast meeting at some stu√y D.C. hotel, she’s deferential to him. The key to just how likable Streep’s Katharine Graham turns out to be is that she never loses that tinge of anxiety – it gives her the same common touch as Bagdikian’s godawful shirts and baggy suits – even as she finds her footing and confidently assumes the power that goes along with her position. Christ knows she’s got a lot be anxious over. The Post opens with a brief prologue set in 1966, when Daniel Ellsberg, then employed by the Rand Corporation, witnesses just how badly the war in Vietnam is going for American troops, has his opinion confirmed to him by LBJ’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), and then watches as McNamara lies to the press, painting a booster’s view of the progress the United States is making in the war. As we know, Ellsberg’s response to McNamara’s lies was to begin photocopying the secret study McNamara had commissioned detailing the U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam: forty-seven volumes...