The movie that put the Gate in Watergate

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This article was published 24/06/2017 (3390 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie about dogged Washington Post reporters cracking the Watergate scandal that brought down former U.S. president Richard Nixon, is currently having a moment.

You know, for some reason.

Whatever your take on the current American political situation, in which alleged obstructions of justice and shadowy backchannel deals have a lot of commentators reaching for the “W” word, you might want to give the film a watch.

FIRST OFF, IT’S A DARN GOOD MOVIE: All the President’s Men, scripted by William Goldman and directed by Alan Pakula, is quietly explosive. Like 2015’s Spotlight, it pulls off the neat little trick of taking the dull, repetitive grind of investigative journalism and somehow making it cinematic. Moment to moment, ATPM can be unabashedly tedious, positively revelling in the anti-spectacle of reporters scribbling shorthand, typing intently and being put on hold. But scene to scene, it’s tense and taut.

There’s a niggly realism and unlikely beauty to the backdrops. Not being able to use the actual Washington Post newsroom, the filmmakers built a replica set, all messy desks and fluorescent track lighting, and filled the trash baskets with actual garbage shipped in from the Post.

Music is used sparingly. The real soundtrack to ATPM is the percussive clack-clack of typewriters.

The two lead performances, from Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, are nicely underplayed. The two mismatched men basically merge into one overlapping journalist whom colleagues only half-jokingly call “Woodstein.” Each actor learned both sets of lines, so they could finish each other’s sentences.

There are chewy minor roles — Jason Robards won a Best Supporting Oscar for his role as irascible editor Ben Bradlee — and crackerjack character actors, instantly recognizable but completely unnameable (“that guy in that thing” level) all over the place. Meredith Baxter has only one scene as Debbie Sloan, the wife of the Republican treasurer who came clean to the grand jury, but she gets a doozy of a line: “This is an honest house,” she tells Woodward and Bernstein when she answers the door.

It’s a resolutely anti-Nixon film, but it plays down political rhetoric. At first, the two men don’t even suspect the investigation might be heading to the Oval Office, and even when they do, they just keep plodding, in an unshowy, just-doing-our-jobs kind of way.

IT’S INFLUENTIAL: Take Woodward’s meeting with his informant, codenamed Deep Throat, who fears phone taps and forces Woodward into shadowy assignations in an underground parking garage. Played by a barely glimpsed Hal Holbrook, he wants to help but remains strangely coy: “You tell me what you know and I’ll confirm.” X-Files fans will immediately recognize the whole vibe.

Deep Throat’s dialogue also enters the popular lexicon when he whispers to Woodward: “Follow the money.”

IT SURE FEELS TOPICAL: ATPM was obviously topical back then: Redford actually bought up the rights when the guys were still breaking the story.

And Watergate has stayed in the public consciousness ever since. Anything even faintly scandalous is instantly dubbed a “gate,” from Comeygate (serious FBI-type business) to Donutgate (singer Ariana Grande licking bakery doughnuts).

In some ways, All the President’s Men channels the paranoid current seen in so many 1970s thrillers (Three Days of the Condor, Winter Kills, The Conversation, Executive Action, The Domino Principle, The Parallax View, a trippy outing also from Pakula), with a deep distrust of official power, a dark sense of conspiratorial webs of money and influence, plenty of disinformation and “non-denial-denials” and a constant thrumming dread. That’s a particular pop-culture moment that is feeling pretty zeitgeisty right now.

Unlike most of that pessimistic genre, however, ATPM offers a gleam of hope in the power of a free press. In these cuckoo-crazy times, with the White House regularly denouncing the media as “fake news,” one can imagine political reporters watching APTM like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, shouting out lines in unison with the characters: “Get me confirmation!” “We’re 20 minutes to deadline!” Or as Bradlee sardonically says at one point: “Nothing is riding on this, except maybe the First Amendment to the Constitution, the freedom of the press and the future of the country.” (That’s my personal favourite.)

It’s hard to imagine what the defining movie of the Trump era might look like. Whatever comes out of the current mess would probably play better as farce, maybe even comic opera. As HBO’s John Oliver has said, this is “Stupid Watergate.” In the meantime, we have All the President’s Men, in which a boring courthouse story about a botched break-in, followed up by two years of untiring reporting, help bring down a corrupt president.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca