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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
To those who have no memory of Watergate, who didn't see "All the President's Men" when it was released in 1976, it may today look like nothing more than a sedate, well-made journalistic detective story. And in the age of seemingly instantaneous tell-all memoirs, of TV docudramas, of headlines being converted into "Law & Order" plots, it may be hard to convey the shock and the thrill of going to see the movie when it was released. Here was something that had never happened before: A president had been elected in a landslide three years earlier, then disgraced, and the story of his fall appeared on the big screen not much more than a year after he had resigned.
There was nothing chancy about what the movie was saying. The facts were in the open, and only diehards and fools believed that Nixon wasn't guilty. Nixon had already become a laughing stock on the screen. In 1975, "Shampoo" featured a clip from Nixon's 1968 victory speech promising to "bring us together." I'll never forget the bitter, derisive laughter that greeted that clip in theaters. People laughed because he had brought us together -- in our hatred of him. But movies lagged far behind history (Vietnam had still barely been dealt with on the screen at that point). It was almost unheard of for a movie to follow the events it depicted so quickly. And I think that rapidity was a reflection of how quickly public opinion changed, both about the importance of Watergate and about Richard Nixon.
Going to see "All the President's Men" was, in a way, going to see our own wising-up enacted for us on the screen. Watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein putting the pieces of the story together became a metaphor for how Americans put the story together. Mary McCarthy wrote about people reading three or four newspapers, plus national newsweeklies, rearranging their schedules to watch the daily broadcast hearings of the Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Sam Ervin. She was describing the thrill of feeling yourself a participant in the fate of the republic. And that thrill was what allowed the movie to overcome its complete lack of dramatic surprise -- what excited everyone about a detective story whose solution we already knew.
The idea of Woodward and Bernstein as our stand-ins only goes so far, though. Spanning the period from June 1972 to January 20, 1973, the day of Nixon's second Inaugural, the movie operates on the tension of watching the reporters work in a vacuum with barely any support from other press and with the public not caring about Watergate. The movie constantly reminds us how easily the story might have fallen through the cracks. Alfred Hitchcock, with his Catholic sense of guilt, might have made the audience feel implicated in that complacency. Alan J. Pakula, allowing us to congratulate ourselves, doesn't press it. He does, however, show us the reporters' frustration, their conviction that there's something here though they can't yet grasp what it is or, like their doubting colleagues, how high it goes. Deep Throat (played by Hal Holbrook in shadowy nighttime shots) is less Woodward's damning source than his existential oracle, emanating from the shadows to prod him to do his job, providing more riddles than answers.
After "Klute" (1972) and "The Parallax View" (1975), "All the President's Men was the third in what came to be called Pakula's "paranoia trilogy." The moments when Pakula tries to ratchet up that paranoia -- Woodward certain he's being followed late at night; Deep Throat warning him that his and Bernstein's lives could be in danger -- feel flat and clumsy. The movie doesn't need those touches, because it takes place in an atmosphere where paranoia is the sensible response to events.
It wasn't the director's best film ("Klute" holds that distinction), but in "All the President's Men" Pakula had found his paranoid dream subject -- a better one than all the stories of nefarious power and conspiracy theories he had spun in the previous two films. The true chill-inducing moments here belong to the actors, Valerie Curtin as a CREEP (the unfortunate and entirely fitting acronym for the Committee to Re-elect the President) worker begging Woodward and Bernstein to get away from her door with the words "They'll see you," or Jane Alexander, in a fine performance of sustained tension, as a CREEP bookkeeper stubbornly giving out information to Bernstein in dribs and drabs while he does everything he can to keep her talking.
Though the movie doesn't do as much as it could with Woodward and Bernstein's uneasy Tom-and-Jerry alliance, and though Hoffman, chain-smoking and fidgeting with energy, is fun to watch, it's Redford who holds the movie together. (After "The Way We Were," "All the President's Men" is his best performance.) Redford seems to go through the movie in the manner of a man carefully guarding his reactions. His usual underplaying, which can seem too removed elsewhere, works beautifully here. His best moments come when, while working the phones, Woodward learns some piece of information that causes his eyes to open just a bit wider and to seem as if he's afraid to take a breath, lest the whole story slip away. Redford's performance is the embodiment of the movie's paranoid style.
As if to remind us of the press's and public's unwillingness to follow the early Watergate revelations through to their logical conclusion, Nixon barely figures in the movie. He appears twice, in news clips, both of them used ironically. At the movie's start he's seen at the high point of his presidency, on June 1, 1972, delivering a speech to Congress after returning from China, and, at the end, taking the oath of office on a newsroom TV set while Woodward and Bernstein sit writing one of the stories that will bring him down.
Nixon is at the heart of 1999's "Dick," a stronger, gutsier movie than "All the President's Men" and one that, unlike Pakula's, never found an audience. Adults assumed it was a teenage movie and teenagers, who had no knowledge of Watergate, stayed away. Directed by Andrew Fleming and written by Fleming and Sheryl Longin, "Dick" is one of the most sophisticated American political satires in years. The movie is a parody of "All the President's Men" and an alternate theory of how Tricky came crashing down, in which the part of Deep Throat is assigned to two outcast-teenage airheads, Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and her best friend Arlene (Michelle Williams).
