Alan J. Pakula | All the President’s Men / 1976

the thriller you’ve already read

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Goldman (screenplay, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward), Alan J. Pakula (director) All the President’s Men / 1976

 

For Christmas this year (2015) I bought a DVD of a movie Howard and I have seen numerous times, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Howard presumed that we already owned it, lost among our rather large library of movies, for we both think of it as one of our favorites.

     Seeing it again yesterday, I felt it was nearly as fresh as the first time we saw it, although I am sure it seemed more immediate in 1976, since we had lived in Washington, DC during the very years of the events portrayed.

     Although after living in Los Angeles for many years, I have grown quite accustomed to seeing familiar building and sites in the movies we attend, at the time of All the President’s Men it was somewhat breathtaking to see so many of the film’s locations that were so very familiar to us. We knew the apartment building, wherein the film’s Bob Woodward lives; I’d several times visited the news room of the Washington Post on my way to see book editor William McPherson; and I’d spent long hours in the Library of Congress; we’d attending so many theater and concert events in the behemoth Kennedy Center; we had visited friends staying at the Watergate Hotel. Pakula uses dozens of noted governmental buildings that anyone who has even visited our nation’s capital city immediately recognizes. So the film put me, as well as a great many other viewers, on familiar ground.

     And yet, the story it told of high government intrigue and a series of mysteriously labyrinthine acts of deceit and conspiracy seemed to come from some other world, as if we were being told an unbelievable story about my own family and friends. And it was this sense of displacement, the simultaneous feeling of intimacy and strangeness about what the news reporters were telling us that created for me—and I am sure for many others who knew this city so well—a sense of awed horror, as if it had been hinted that my uncles and aunts had been involved in some vast conspiratorial criminal act that was threatening the lives of the entire family if we dared to tell anything we had known about.

     Washington is a small city, and if you have lived there for any amount of time (Howard and I lived there for 16 long years) when involved in any governmental role (the Hirschhorn Museum where Howard worked was part of The Smithsonian conglomerate) you felt like you were, unintentionally a member of the administration, no matter how much you disliked the officials currently in charge.

     We were not supporters of President Nixon,* and certainly did not ever think of him as a friendly uncle; indeed I wanted him, as I believe the film intends, to get caught—just as we know from the outset of this mystery-thriller he will be.

     In fact, there is very little mystery about the events the film portrays. I had read The Washington Post daily during the events the film covers, sharing the gradual revelations that All the President’s Men reveals to us. Yet every time I see this film I grown tense, am impatient with Pakula’s steady, slow pace as the two young reporters, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) work to find a chink in the wall of secrecy that greets their every question.

     The plot sends them into the vast reading room of the Library of Congress as they flip through book requests to no avail; Bernstein flies to Miami, only to cool his heels in a waiting room ruled by the icy secretary (Polly Holliday); and time and again, doors are slammed in their faces. Even “Deep Throat” (Hal Holbrook) isn’t telling, as he merely confirms or metaphorically steers Woodward down a different road from one he is traveling: “Follow the money trail.”

     Through much of this “thriller” absolutely nothing happens. Is it any wonder that Bernstein is ready to jump to easy conclusions? I mean, we know they are right in their suspicions. In short, much of the tension of this film develops is out of a sense of frustration. And I’ve noted each time I watch it that I begin to shiver—not just out of disgust that I feel about the nation’s leaders and their institutions, but simply in anticipation. I can hardly wait for the truth to be fully revealed.

     Every time they fine one clue, the world-be heroes must seek out yet another, a third. Or they discover the questions they’ve been asking were not expressed simply enough. Almost as a joke, William Goldman’s excellent script sends them suddenly into a home where a woman who, appreciative of their writing, is completely read to talk—only to reveal a few moments later that she is an employee in the department store Garfinkel’s, and not the government worker they sought.

   Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards, Jr.) at time stands almost as a roadblock, at other times, amazingly encouraging his hungry reporters to keep searching, while permitting them to move ahead with the story that, if they’d gotten it wrong, might put the entire journalistic world and the First Amendment into jeopardy. Somewhat like an overprotective father, he pushes and pulls the entity he calls “Woodstein” into a pattern that reiterates the rock rhythm of their reportage: on step forward and two steps back.

     Yet today’s newscasters are far less courageous. When Woodward and Bernstein finally get the goods on Nixon’s administration, not matter what the viewer’s political values, there is such great relief that the truth has finally been outed that he has little choice but to cheer or break out in tears for the failure of American governance.

     The subject of this film, accordingly, is not at all what it pretends to be: who was behind the Watergate break-in to the offices of the National Democratic Party. Rather, the real object of this film’s intense investigation is not so much political as it is a search for truth, for a reality that within those long governmental halls seems seldom to exist.

    

*If Nixon was a paranoic monster—and he was—at least he pretended to play by the rules, unlike our current President who makes clear that even the US Constitution not apply to him. What Nixon did was game playing in comparison with the totally corrupt and mad autocrat in that position today. The sad thing is that the very newspaper which revealed Nixon’s corruption has now bowed down to Trump’s dictates, destroying any possibility of fair and open reportage.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).