In a sentenceEvery word in the newspaper is true and Paul Newman still has every right to be furious
Miami. A union leader, Joey Diaz, has vanished, and the federal strike force run by Elliott Rosen (Bob Balaban) has nothing. Rosen leaves a file open where Megan Carter (Sally Field), a reporter on the Miami Standard, will see it, and the file says the force is investigating Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), a liquor wholesaler whose late father was a mobster and whose uncle, Santos Malderone (Luther Adler), still is. Megan prints it. Gallagher, who knows nothing about Diaz, arrives at work to find his trucks idle and his men walking out. He goes to the newspaper to ask Megan who told her, and she will not say. Teresa Perrone (Melinda Dillon), a devout friend of Gallagher’s, knows where he was on the day Diaz disappeared, and wants to say so without saying why.
Sydney Pollack’s drama about a reporter, a prosecutor and the man they ruin between them is intelligent, unhurried and properly grown up. Paul Newman gives it a spine; the romance Kurt Luedtke bolts on to it does not.
Absence of Malice is the film of someone who knows how a wrong story gets into print without anyone lying. A prosecutor wants a lever. A reporter wants a byline. A lawyer wants to know whether the paper can be sued. Each of them does his job, and at the end of the chain stands a man who has done nothing. Kurt Luedtke wrote it and Sydney Pollack directs it with the patience of someone who trusts the argument, and for most of its 116 minutes the trust is repaid. It is a good, careful, adult film with one soft joint, and the soft joint is the love story.
Newman is the reason to see it. Michael Gallagher is a quiet man who runs a liquor warehouse and has spent his life being judged by his father’s name, and Newman plays him almost entirely in reaction: a look at a headline, a pause before he answers a question, a decision to say less than he knows. He does not make speeches. When he walks into the newsroom early on and asks Megan who gave her the story, he is not angry yet, only curious about how such a thing is done, and the curiosity is worse than shouting would have been. Later, when he has worked out exactly how the machine runs, Newman lets us watch him decide to use it. It is some of the stillest acting of his career, and some of the best.
Sally Field has the harder part and the worse luck. Megan Carter is a plausible reporter, quick and bright and certain that printing a true thing is always the right thing, and Field plays her at speed, pencil out, questions ready. The trouble is that Luedtke then has her fall for the man she has just ruined, and asks us to find it winning. We did not. Every scene the two of them spend by the water or in bed takes a little of the pressure off the indictment, and the film is at its weakest when it wants us to like Megan rather than understand her.
Around them the cast is exact. Bob Balaban’s Rosen is a small, chilly civil servant who believes he is on the side of the angels and never raises his voice. Josef Sommer’s McAdam and John Harkins’s Davidek have a conversation about what the paper can safely say that is the most quietly frightening scene in the film, because it is about liability and not about Gallagher at all. And Wilford Brimley arrives in the last stretch as James J. Wells, sits down, and in one long scene of plain talk walks off with the picture.
Then there is Melinda Dillon. Teresa Perrone is a woman who wants to help a friend and is terrified of what helping will cost, and Dillon plays her with her hands, which never stop moving, and a voice that keeps dropping to a whisper as if someone might be listening. There is a scene with her, early in the morning, that we will not describe. It left us shaken, and it is the moment the film stops being an argument about journalism and becomes a film about a person. Pollack plays it without music and almost without cutting. He was right to.
Owen Roizman shoots Miami flat and bright, all glare off water and car bonnets, and the offices in fluorescent white, so that nowhere looks like a place where something sinister could happen, which is the point. Terence Marsh gives the newsroom real clutter and Gallagher’s warehouse the right bareness. Sheldon Kahn cuts the conversations slowly and lets people finish their sentences. Dave Grusin’s score is the one department that misjudges the film: easy saxophone and soft keys that make a hard story sound like a comfortable one, and it is loudest exactly where the romance is weakest.
Set against Three Days of the Condor (1975), this is Pollack with the same distrust of institutions and far less running; it is talkier, slower, and better about how ordinary people behave inside a bad system. Watch it with someone who has sat in a meeting where a decision was taken about a stranger, and expect an argument afterwards about whether Megan deserved what she got, and whether Gallagher did.
The critic calls the film a compelling and disturbing story with an important point to make. They single out the confrontation between Newman and Field as a standout scene.
Read the full review →The review appears broadly positive about the film’s treatment of press responsibility and misinformation. It praises the film for addressing these issues without the excesses of earlier issue-driven cinema.
Read the full review →The page is inaccessible, so the critic’s verdict cannot be established. The available page text does not identify anything singled out for praise or complaint.
Read the full review →Hutchinson finds the drama somewhat worthy but still watchable. He singles out Melinda Dillon’s performance and the Newman–Field confrontation for praise.
Read the full review →
Ace in the HoleBilly Wilder’s reporter is worse than Megan and knows it; the nastiest newspaper film made.
All the President's MenThe flattering version of the same trade: the same phone calls, the opposite outcome.
The VerdictNewman a year later, in a courtroom, playing a man with even less left to lose.
The InsiderA source, a journalist and a lawyer deciding what can be aired, with real consequences.
Shattered Glass · not reviewed yetA newsroom, an editor and the slow realisation that the facts were never checked.
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