Alan J. Pakula turns the slow work of reporting into a thriller we would recommend to almost anyone. Its crowded trail of names occasionally tests the patience, but the people doing the checking keep us absorbed.
All the President’s Men is an excellent thriller about the slow business of establishing what a newspaper can safely print. Alan J. Pakula makes us care about the checking, including the steps that a less patient film would hurry through on its way to an accusation. We would recommend it even to anyone who thinks a film about the Watergate investigation sounds like homework. The tension comes from having enough information to suspect something and still being some distance from being able to prove it.
Robert Redford, as Bob Woodward, and Dustin Hoffman, as Carl Bernstein, make a convincing team without smoothing away the differences between them. Their shared scenes have enough impatience and friction to spare us a mutual admiration exercise. We believe in their concentration, and in the effort required to stay interested when an answer fails to settle anything. Neither performance asks us to applaud a journalist merely for being a journalist, which is a considerable relief.
Gordon Willis gives the Washington Post newsroom a hard brightness that does not offer quite the comfort we expect from a well-lit room. George Jenkins’s production design fills it with the ordinary clutter of office work, making the surroundings convincing without encouraging us to stop and admire the furniture. Beyond it, the shadowed car parks allow darkness to occupy an uncomfortable amount of the screen. We were frightened by those spaces: it is difficult to listen calmly to a conversation when we keep trying to see what the shadows might conceal.
Robert L. Wolfe’s editing gives the investigation a steady pressure without pretending that each new piece of information deserves a sudden burst of excitement. The repeated business of asking, listening and checking remains absorbing because we can follow how much work each answer leaves to do. David Shire’s music is effective in its restraint, allowing the film’s uncertainty to persist rather than telling us how frightened to be. There is room for hesitation, and for us to wonder whether the reporters have understood what they have heard.
William Goldman has to make a succession of names interesting while keeping the connections between them comprehensible. His screenplay mostly manages this by keeping the question of proof in front of us, although there are stretches when we are keeping track rather than becoming more involved. Jason Robards, as Ben Bradlee, helps give those details weight; his authority makes us feel that somebody will have to answer for what reaches the page. The supporting characters do not all receive comparable attention, and some feel defined entirely by the information they can supply.
Within the political thriller, the film is unusually willing to spend time on routine work. It trusts that we will find uncertainty troubling without needing an obvious threat at every stage, and its confidence is largely justified. There is something reassuring in its faith that persistence and careful reporting can matter, though we would hesitate to take that faith for a complete account of how power works. The film stays close to the reporters and the practical limits of their knowledge.
Give it an evening when the names have a chance of sticking. At 138 minutes, it asks for sustained attention, and it does not treat confusion as a reason to abandon the details. We would keep the phones out of reach; there are enough distractions in the newsroom.
