All the President’s Men
I’ve been wanting to rewatch Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” for a while. Even before Steven Spielberg made a compelling prelude to it with “The Post,” the increasingly-clear connection between Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election and Donald J. Trump becoming president has made me want to revisit this definitive cinematic representation of the unfolding of the Watergate scandal starting in June 1972. What makes Pakula’s film so vital and alive, however, is that it isn’t a police procedural but a journalistic one, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein start down the rabbit hole that, in August 1974, will eventually force Richard M. Nixon to resign as President. You’ve never seen a film with so many phone calls be so riveting to watch.
A big part of the film’s success comes from the fact that it isn’t a period piece, but was made a mere two years after Nixon’s resignation. That means that the film isn’t beholden to a set way filmmakers typically tell such historically-based films. Because Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman were coming out immediately after the events depicted, the urgency and tension they instill in the film, adapted from Woodward and Bernstein’s book, feels more immediate, without the artificiality such films usually seem to get away with. This feels like Pakula was just following the journalists around with a camera as they started to peel back the layers of what would be the most significant constitutional crisis the country had seen since the Civil War. I mean, Woodward and Bernstein in real life looked nothing like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively, but the point is that you won’t hear any nostalgic use of ’70s songs here to set time and place- Pakula didn’t need them.
The film begins with the break-in at the National Democratic Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, and the arrest of the five perpetrators. At The Washington Post the next day, Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden), sends new reporter Bob Woodward (Redford) down to the courthouse to cover the story, thinking it will be a minor story of burglary. When he returns to the newsroom with evidence indicating maybe a larger plot of wiretapping and bugging taking place, he is reluctantly given a greenlight to dig further, and soon is working with the more seasoned Carl Bernstein (Hoffman) to get to the heart of a scandal that will define their careers, and the country, in the years to follow.
I have never been interested in journalism when it comes to discussing movies or looking for stories- I’d much rather discuss the finished product- and watching “All the President’s Men,” I don’t know that I’d be up for it. Of course, by this point I’ve seen plenty of films about journalism and looking deep into stories like “The Paper,” “The Post” and David Fincher’s brilliant “Zodiac,” but Pakula’s film has a drive and energy that those films cannot match, and a big part of it comes from how it dramatizes the struggle reporters can have when it comes to not only collecting information on their story, but getting multiple sources (or even one) to validate it. Some of the most riveting moments in the film are not so much Woodward’s clandestine meetings with a source known only as “Deep Throat” (Hal Holbrook) in a parking garage, but when they are trying to get information out of a frightened bookkeeper (Jane Alexander) who works at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) about a slush fund that may have been used to pay the people arrested at the Watergate, and finance other operations. A scene where her and Bernstein are working out a shorthand so that she feels comfortable revealing information they need for their story is beautifully written by Goldman, directed by Pakula and acted by Hoffman and Alexander. Yes, the Deep Throat scenes are important for the film’s political tension, and Holbrook is fantastic in the role, but seeing a woman who realizes she is in over her head, and is concerned about repercussions towards her and her family, but still finds a way to do what’s right, gets at the heart of what made Woodward and Bernstein’s crusade for the truth so heroic- they found themselves staring into the lion’s den, and didn’t blink, and that resonates down to the people they are reaching out to in this case, as well.
Pakula is a director I still find myself catching up with, and that will happen, but it was important for me to rewatch “All the President’s Men” before moving on to films like “Klute,” “The Parallax View” and “Sophie’s Choice,” not just so that I could be reminded of his talent with complicated stories and building films, but so that I could be reminded of a time when the journalistic pursuit of truth sometimes meant bumping up against the ugly nature of politics, and how the former took precedent. “The Post” does the same thing, and hopefully, we’ll see journalism find its way back to that at this complicated time in American history now.
