Looking Back at ‘All the President’s Men’

With the upcoming awards season peppered with political conspiracy thriller, potential award-winning fodder like ‘Spotlight’, ‘Truth’, and ‘Bridge of Spies’, the time seems ripe to delve back into the film that really set the benchmark for the genre.

From hollywoodreporter.com: Robert Redford (left) and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men

‘I guess I don’t have the taste for the jugular you guys have,’ shrugs a colleague of the protagonists of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men when confronted about her failure to follow up a crucial lead to Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford). It's testament to the film's quality that such a 'throw away' line in the scheme of the plot from a 'throw away' character echoes the film's central drive so well: that of the 'taste of the jugular'. The thirst to know more, here in a journalistic context. The desire to uncover, though not necessarily undermine, secrets and lies. In All the President's Men Pakula delves into the fascinating worlds of 1970's American politics through our two central figures of journalists Bernstein and Woodward, as they investigate the Watergate Scandal and President Nixon for the Washington Post.

Political journalism, even that surrounding such intriguing topics, is a tough nut to crack. Fidelity to the truth and a sense of storytelling is a difficult balance to find, but Pakula's direction and William Goldman's screenplay do wonders in both staying faithful to facts, and also keeping up not only a consistent pace but consistent entertainment even in the unlikeliest of places. Journalists just shooting the breeze at the workplace or debating over the finer points of their prose styles may not immediately strike one as invigorating stuff but Goldman turns it into the manna of screenwriters; each and every line of dialogue is incredibly efficient in that it either adds to plot or character (crucial in a film like this where they more often than not run the risk of becoming mere facilitators to the storyline) and yet also remains very vibrant and unforced. Take this following exchange:

 Within barely over 3 minutes we get insight into characters we never see outside of the workplace, and yet get such a palatable sense of who they are in terms of personalities and more importantly, what sort of work ethic and dynamic they have; some subtly delivered exposition regarding the case they are covering; and for aspiring journalists some fine points on how to fine-tune one's work into something better than the sum of its parts.

Or for wordless wonder, this pullaway shot is just some sublime filmmaking too. I couldn't find one of the best directed scenes of the film, that terrific scene in which Redford's Woodward simultaneously handles several phone conversations in one go, but that's another example of Pakula's restrained but excellent procedural direction doing wonders with the most seemingly inane, everyday tasks.

Redford's performance in this film as a whole is incredibly underrated. Dustin Hoffman is very good too at being this eccentric, slick charming fellow who takes a more erratic approach to investigation, but Redford's employment of his usual star power in addition to the fine character work he puts on display here. Woodward is a firm, blunt and yet somehow incredibly fascinating figure to follow through the film, acting as sort of the grounding and incisive thorn to Bernstein's rosy approach to following up leads and charming their subjects. Both him and Hoffman are particularly captivating in their standalone scenes, with Hoffman's interview with Jane Alexander's bookkeeper where he shows such remarkable blend of charm and kind of an undercutting sleaziness, and Redford in any scene where he shows the increasing desire to crack the case, and particularly in his scenes with Hal Holbrook's Deep Throat.

These scenes are some of the most incredibly directed and acted scenes in movie history, period. I could and may well do in the near future an article on how terrific the use of lighting, cutaways, and closeups in this scene do wonders to not only amplify the paranoia, but also give the whole setting and situation an air of otherworldliness within the worldliness. For now though I'll focus on Holbrook's performance. It's an incredible few scenes wonder where you can never see his face in full light; technically speaking a limited performance in this respect, but you don't really notice as just through his voice and faint glimpses of his eyes you gain full insight into perhaps the biggest enigma of them all. Technically speaking his dialogue could've been rendered on-the-nose, contrived information overload but despite not understanding all the terminology and needing re-watches to fully comprehend a lot of the political stuff in the film, Holbrook immediately aided me on each re-watch to get back up to scratch with the film. Jason Robards, Martian Balsalm, Stephen Collins and Ned Beatty are all also very good in supporting the overall arc of the story as supporting players but Holbrook is definitely the highlight. He acts as a most fascinating guide to the guide within our film and in the highly competitive year of 1976 supporting he's my win.

The politics in this film is incredibly well done because of how accessible it all is. I won't get into it too much but here is the opening scene of the film which in a few four minutes of seamless montage gets the point across so well and so thouroughly (it's just such an interesting point in American political history)