It Had a Great Fall

I recently reached back for another classic film of the 70s, All the President's Men. Going in, I wondered if I would have a similar reaction as the one I had to Frost/Nixon, namely that the movie's stakes could only appear to be so high, given a lack of "having been there" to live the events as they unfolded.

I can't say conclusively how much this was a factor, but I can say that I didn't find this movie nearly as entertaining as Frost/Nixon, or even State of Play, a modern "investigative journalism" movie to which it can be more directly compared.

In my mind, the biggest flaw of All the President's Men is that it really doesn't explain things very clearly. I believe the movie presumes the audience already has an intimate knowledge of the subject matter. And since it was made just four years after the Watergate break-in (and only two years after Nixon's resignation), this is a reasonable assumption for the time. Is it possible that, say, United 93 assumes knowledge of the September 11th terrorist attacks that someone born in 2003 isn't going to have in detail if they watch the movie in the late 2030s? Yet I say, regardless of whether the presentation of the film made sense in the context of its time, the question of a supposed "classic" movie is whether it stands the test of time. I'm not sure that All the President's Men does.

The film piles on name after name after name, only bothering to actually put faces to maybe one-third of them. The investigation of the two journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, is often lacking in factual "connective tissue." Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman both give energetic and convincing performances. When they get excited over some new breakthrough they've made, I absolutely believe their excitement. But I don't always understand it. Who is this we're talking about? Why is this thing you've just learned important? What does it prove? As often as not, I found the answer to one or more of these questions to be completely unclear.

That enthusiasm from the leads, along with good supporting performances from names like Jason Robards and Hal Holbrook, was enough for me to be caught up the emotion for as much as an hour of film. But as my intellect lagged ever farther and farther behind it, I became more frustrated and bored. As the movie plowed past the two hour mark, I was long past ready for an ending.

But even as the movie felt too long, it paradoxically ended up being too short. With five minutes to go, the movie makes huge leaps in time to pull in final details. In rapid succession, headlines appear to us on a teletype machine, culled from a span of over 18 months, telling us emotionlessly and without drama that so-and-so has been indicted, some-guy has pleaded guilty, Nixon has resigned. And then boom, roll credits. 135 minutes of buildup for no dramatic climax? Just a machine gunning of newspaper headlines and out?

What starts strong and promising ends up flatter than reading the whole thing from a history text book. Quality acting carries the film farther than it would otherwise have gotten, but it still doesn't make it nearly far enough. I rate the movie a C+.