‘The Post,” the new movie starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, is three things: a film about the Pentagon Papers, classified documents about the Vietnam War that were leaked to the media in 1971, a film about the press and Donald Trump, and, finally, an indictment about Harvey Weinstein and sexism in Hollywood.
According to Streep, who is interviewed on December 14 in the Washington Post, the film is mostly about sexism. Streep says that the new film came from a place of “grievance” about sexism.
“People were really scared and demoralized [after Trump was elected],” Streep told the Post. But her passion for the film came from a different place. “The passion, honestly, that I had wasn’t political on that end,” Streep said. “It was political on the feminist end. I wish that my citizen heart beat harder than the one that feels the grievance, but that’s the way it goes.”
Still, for openly liberal Streep, the political component is too strong to totally ignore. Hornaday reports that “Streep recalled the days immediately after the election when, alarmed by reports of possible Russian hacking, she got together with Robert De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal and others (including a former FBI agent) to discuss their anxieties.”
Hornaday concludes: “What Spielberg might have intended as a reminder of the principles of a free press standing firm in the face of a paranoid and hostile presidency has, perhaps more meaningfully, become a portrait of a woman born into privilege, but still having to battle systemic sexism, the condescension of her male colleagues and her own internalized self-doubt to come into her own as a corporate leader and journalist.”
Sounds like “The Sarah Palin Story.”
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