All the President’s Men is a lot of things: great ‘70s movie, great journalism movie, great political movie, great Redford movie, great Hoffman movie. What it’s not is a great Katharine Graham movie. The fascinating publisher of the Washington Post through the 1960s and 1970s is mentioned but not seen in Men – mostly by Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), always as “Mrs. Graham” – which doesn’t exactly jibe with her actual participation in Post’s Watergate coverage, according to both her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Personal History and Bradlee’s autobiography A Good Life.
But it looks like Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep could rectify that with their new film The Post. It covers the paper’s other earth-shaking ‘70s story – their battle with the federal government over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a leaked Department of Defense history of America’s covert actions in Vietnam – but there’s a very President’s Men vibe to the film, which should be taken as the high praise that it is.
Cinema’s most reliable honorable man, Tom Hanks, co-stars as Post editor-in-chief Bradlee; the jaw-dropping supporting cast includes Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, Bruce Greenwood, Tracy Letts, Sarah Paulson, Jesse Plemons, Matthew Rhys, Michael Stuhlbarg, Bradley Whitford, Zach Woods, Bob Odenkirk, and David Cross. (So, yes, technically, Steven Spielberg directed a Mr. Show movie.)
Here’s the trailer:
The Post is out December 22 in limited release; it goes wide on January 12.