All the President's Men (1976)
directed by
screenplay by
based on All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
I can't attest to the accuracy of the source material or the film. I do know, if it's examined in the light of the knowledge that Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, acted as much out of pique at being passed over for director of the FBI as integrity, it would have been a different story. The outcome for Richard Nixon would've been the same, but still, a different story.
As to the movie, well, we love it. It's a procedural story with whole scenes given over to Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) questioning people in detail or going through records. The case building is done slowly and methodically, the way real reporting needs to be done. Berstein might be biased, but Woodward is clearly letting the facts link together, one after another. It's not fast-paced or action-packed and I find every moment riveting. Hoffman and Redford are good together. As they play them, Bernstein is more experienced, but also a smug cynic and willing to be a shit to get his story, and Woodward is more straitlaced and a nicer guy. Again, I can't speak to the real men, but it is sort of how they've always come across when they show up as talking heads.
The film is largely shot naturalistically, and scenes are filled with background noise. There's a real fly-on-the-wall quality that lends to the movie's verisimilitude.
One of the things I'm impressed by with the movie is that so much of it assumes an informed audience. There are things heard in the background about other political events going on that never get explained, particularly the exposure of Democratic VP candidate, Thomas Eagleton's mental health and withdrawal from the race.
All the President's Men is the third of Pakula's paranoia trilogy. The first, Klute (1971), is about a detective searching for a missing friend, and the second, The Parallax View (1974), is a conspiracy movie about shady goings-on behind political assassinations. The seventies were definitely a paranoid time, what with assassinations, terrorism, government scandals, and what not the seeming norm. Coupled with a fragmenting society in the face of all sorts of social and cultural changes, it was an era fraught with fear and uncertainty.
AtPM shifts this feeling from the fiction of the first two films to reality and of the three, it's the one that feels the most believable. I don't believe there was a conspiracy behind JFK's murder, but I do know politicians do stupid, illegal things and then try to cover them up all the time. When it's done by the president, especially one as smart and popular as Nixon (he got 60% of the popular vote in both '68 and 72), it's downright unsettling. The scenes where Woodward and Deep Throat (a great, self-important Hal Holbrook) thing they're being spied on and when Woodward and Bernstein think they're being bugged are downright spooky and feel absolutely believable.
Verdict: A keeper. We both love procedurals, and this is one of the best. For that reason alone we'd probably keep it.
Note: for a real excursion into paranoid, someways down the line we'll be rewatching Coppola's The Conversation w/Gene Hackman. It's one of the real masterworks of the era.
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| Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford |
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