The Post

The Post

Now that I've seen every best picture nominated film for 2017, I can confidently say this one is the least good. I feel bad saying "the worst" because it's not a terrible movie, but it's also not a very good movie.

The key word here is "phony." Now this could be seen as a pun, because of how often people are on the phone in the the film, but it's not. I just didn't believe a second of this movie.

Most of the problems stem from the screenplay simply not being unique or interesting. The dialogue and characters are so vanilla that it's hard to discern anyone from anyone else, and their Oscar-y emotional speeches feel just like the same Oscar-y emotional speeches we've seen a million times before and don't shed light on any sort of new perspective that gives the movie a purpose. This movie has no purpose. If it was going to be about the country's first female newspaper publisher, it should've been a focused character study. Instead it felt unfocused, typically shifting the spotlight to Tom Hanks, who I'll get to, and feeling like it needs to only talk about Vietnam and Nixon as though hundreds of other movies have never covered those topics before. If the premise is that it's about Kay Graham, then it should've been about Kay Graham.

Keeping the uninteresting screenplay in mind, Meryl Streep gives a solidly okay performance, but Tom Hanks is genuinely bad. He's doing a New York accent for his character and that's the extent of his effort. He never feels present or believable, and he's missing the Hanks charm that he's normally able to coast off of. Even when he yells and gets emotional it feels completely noncommittal, like he really didn't care. The script is largely to blame, but he still stuck out from the rest of the cast as particularly phony. Everyone else in the movie has such a small role that they're not really given a chance to be memorable (including Sarah Paulson, which is particularly insulting because of how insanely good she is), though I must say seeing Bob Odenkirk and David Cross together again was very exciting as a Mr. Show fan, watching Alison Brie do scenes with Meryl Streep was really cool as a Community fan, and seeing Zach Woods in a Spielberg film is very exciting as an improv fan.

Even the filmmaking feels unnatural and forced. Spielberg is great at doing subtle long takes. These are not subtle. The camera is constantly moving, but it never really moves with purpose. It's like Spielberg knew the movie was gonna be boring so he tried to shoot it like Goodfellas, but that actually managed to make it worse. The real fix here would've been to not take on this script, or at least do heavy punch-ups on it, but since that's not entirely helpful, I'd say the fix would be to trust that the script and characters will be enough to make the movie interesting, because when the director has the camera hover around characters for no reason it makes it clear that they have no vision or confidence in the project. It feels like a panic move.

If you don't care about watching all the Oscar movies then I'd say you're fine to skip this one. It doesn't leave any sort of impact, and your time can be spent watching a better movie. I want my good Spielberg movies to come back!