THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
HUMPTY DUMPTY THE SCREEN In All the President's Men an anonymous source who is key to the Watergate investigation is always referred to as "Deep Throat," and the suggestion in this nickname that...
...This is disappointing too...
...In the end they therefore give us the human side of the news how Nixon drank heavily, groveled on the floor, made for the window, etc...
...Outside...
...So we are stuck with Woodward and Bernstein, and a movie that, to be honest, doesn't do much to compensate us for our loss...
...But then, his plot doesn't convince us that what we are seeing tells us much about Woodward and Bernstein, either...
...Since they attempt to make their point merely be turning their volume up, Pakula's howitzer-sized sound effects don't really convince us that what we are seeing tells us much about Watergate...
...The film becomes, in effect, a see-sawing match between a golden boy and a hustler, a straight arrow and a hippy, a WASP and a Jew, a Jeff and a Mutt...
...When Woodward insists they not press a fellow reporter whose ex-boyfriend has access to the CREEP personnel roster, the woman drops the list on Woodward's desk anyway a day or two later...
...We begin to feel cheated, as we would in a grind house, when we figure out that the plot here isn't just a pretext for showing us what we really came to see...
...And this is from a friendly source rather than one of the men he is supposed to be investigating...
...Where Bernstein has to sweat and finagle for every scoop he gets, Woodward has it all just dropped in his lap...
...I don't know the whole thing smells like a cover-up to me...
...Such long shots are the only real flourishes of style the film has, too, except for its opening shot...
...We find ourselves trying to peer around them, wishing they would get out of the way and being irritated that they don't...
...Though Redford then hired Hoffman to act in his film, the relationship established by their competition for the property seems to be carried over into the relationship between Woodward and Bernstein in the film itself...
...HUMPTY DUMPTY THE SCREEN In All the President's Men an anonymous source who is key to the Watergate investigation is always referred to as "Deep Throat," and the suggestion in this nickname that somehow journalism is like pornography seems an apt one...
...Woodward (Redford) is Mr...
...It's as if the porno movie were focused on the man all the time instead of the woman...
...Woodward will call some fat cat to make a simple inquiry about a campaign check he has traced, and the man will, out of sheer panic, spill more information than Woodward would ever have guessed he had...
...A lot of this film is spent on the telephone, and the difference between the two men is apparent in each one's calls...
...The production values of the film seem almost to anticipate and acknowledge our impatience...
...As they drive around Washington having door after door slammed in their faces by CREEP staff members, an aerial zoom shot pulls back from their car until it is swallowed up in the city's traffic...
...Indeed, Bernstein has to push his way onto the Watergate assignment in the first place, Woodward being the reporter to whom it happened to be assigned...
...Inside, while Bernstein (Hoffman) is Mr...
...Once Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have exposed the political mess, they can sense that the public is still listless, still looking for new Watergate kicks...
...But the filmmakers must hope that if the background we see is absolutely authentic, it will make up for not giving us the background we want...
...The ground rules that apply on the phone also hold pretty much in face-to-face confrontations...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...A scandal such as Watergate titillates and leads us on...
...More typical of Bernstein's experience is a day spent cooling his heels in a D.A.'s waiting room, until in desperation he lures the man's secretary away just to get access to his office...
...It's really the most non-descript office imaginable, and recreating both the scale and the decor of the original has added nothing to the film...
...At the end, having no other way to conclude, Pakula repeats this effect, swelling the sound of teletypes on the track until it is a fusillade...
...Apparently Dustin Hoffman tried to get the screen rights to Bernstein and Woodward's book for his own production company, but lost out to Wildwood Enterprises, which is Robert Redford's company...
...The only times we see the two men acting as one are the moments when their investigation is mired down...
...Despite its title, the men whom All the Presidents Men is about are Woodward and Bernstein themselves...
...As a result of these feelings, no number of revelations and resignations is ever enough...
...Redford has no doubt cast himself in the right role as the recipient of these phone calls, for no actor has had more experience registering incredulity...
...Whatever the current state of the investigation is, it doesn't satisfy us...
...As they riffle through hundreds of call slips the White House sent to the Library of Congress, pursuing a lead that is not finally going to pan out, the camera recedes farther and farther from them in an overhead boom shot...
...In Bernstein's crucial phone call, on the other hand, far from having the whole thing blabbed to him without even asking, he has to propose a moment of silence just as a way for the person on the other end to confirm something he already knows...
...There must be some other version of the scandal, we always feel, that will really tell it all that will expose the whole, sordid, horrible, delicious story we are not now getting...
...But in the interim, in order to string us along and stretch out the material, they even try giving us their own story...
...In a sense Woodward and Bernstein, and filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, are defeated by their own material...
...Woodward is the one with the connection to "Deep Throat," who volunteers to leak all sorts of Information to guide the reporters...
...Pakula has no other way to conclude because the climax to the Watergate expose is finally irrelevant to the personal story he has been telling...
...Woodward and Bernstein pass all the crises in their relationship earlier, but because he has to pretend this film is about the Watergate affair, Pakula has to press on toward its crisis...
...Naivete" is his forte...
...Its very strength is their failure, for Watergate is of such interest to us that it overwhelms any interest we might have taken in Woodward and Bernstein...
...One background the film contains, for instance, is the Washington Post's newsroom, all 35,000 square feet of which have been reproduced at enormous expense on two sound stages in Burbank...
...It is essentially the background of their story we are focused on...
...The effect of these shots, seeing Woodward and Bernstein from so far away, is to diminish, isolate and unite them all at once...
...It is literally a shot, an almost painfully loud report of a pistol heard as a typewriter key strikes a piece of paper in micro close-up...
...But when Bernstein at last gets his foot in the door of one of the names on that list, he has to pressure her for all he is worth just to drag a little cooperation out of her...
...Its implicit promise is always to go further and shock us more, so we quickly become jaded...
Vol. 103 • April 1976 • No. 9
