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starladyI rewatched All the President's Men (1976, dir. Alan J. Pakula) last night for probably the first time since I first saw it in 1998 or thereabouts, when I was in seventh grade. I immediately went out and read the book, which tells you a lot about the kind of kid I was. Come to think of it, it may well have been 1997, the year of the impeachment. In any case, I haven't watched the movie in this millennium, and doing it now is eerie.
Twenty years on, what's striking to me about the movie is just how little of the Watergate scandal it depicts--it spans the year and change in which Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's "garage freak," guided Woodward and Bernstein's investigation, which mostly consisted of wearing down shoe leather trying to find sources who would go on the record (they wouldn't) and, failing that, finding ways to corroborate what people would tell them anonymously about what they knew. It ends just after they print (correctly, but without all their supporting evidence properly verified) that H.R. Haldeman was the fifth man controlling the CREP slush fund which bankrolled all the dirty work that Nixon wanted done. We learn what happened to all the major players in the scandal via typewriter at the end; most of the higher-ups are only voices on the phone in the movie, and Nixon himself appears only in file footage playing on the television at strategic points. It works, though.
We're living in Stupid Watergate now, of course; the broad lineaments of what went down have been known for more than a year at this point, and (crucially) it only remains for the facts to be established in courts of law and (hopefully) for the perpetrators to face justice, but whereas Woodward and Bernstein can barely grasp the ramifications of what they're reporting, even when their investigation has identified the White House Chief of Staff as being guilty of criminal conspiracy, there's only parlor game questions left about what our sitting president does and doesn't know. In a weird way I found myself envying them.
Given the recent revelations about Dustin Hoffman's harassment of women on set, his turn as Bernstein is even more awkward to watch than it was before--there are more than a few scenes where he, with his more free-wheeling reporting style, is trying to pressure female witnesses into telling him what they know and/or go on the record about it, and it's impossible now to watch those scenes and not wonder how much the women were really acting acutely uncomfortable, as opposed to just being acutely uncomfortable. I found myself thinking of Spotlight, predictably, because it's the other great newspaper movie and because it shares many of the same concerns, and one which pays homage to this one but also plays off the expectations that this one generates. Towards the end, I also realized that a key scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is also a direct tip of the hat to one of the final scenes in this movie, which makes what Winter Soldier tries and fails to do even clearer. Spotlight is about complicity; All the President's Men is about conspiracy, and how much work it takes to pull at the few loose threads the conspirators left dangling. Both, ultimately, reinforce that there's no substitute in journalism for persistence.
Twenty years on, what's striking to me about the movie is just how little of the Watergate scandal it depicts--it spans the year and change in which Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's "garage freak," guided Woodward and Bernstein's investigation, which mostly consisted of wearing down shoe leather trying to find sources who would go on the record (they wouldn't) and, failing that, finding ways to corroborate what people would tell them anonymously about what they knew. It ends just after they print (correctly, but without all their supporting evidence properly verified) that H.R. Haldeman was the fifth man controlling the CREP slush fund which bankrolled all the dirty work that Nixon wanted done. We learn what happened to all the major players in the scandal via typewriter at the end; most of the higher-ups are only voices on the phone in the movie, and Nixon himself appears only in file footage playing on the television at strategic points. It works, though.
We're living in Stupid Watergate now, of course; the broad lineaments of what went down have been known for more than a year at this point, and (crucially) it only remains for the facts to be established in courts of law and (hopefully) for the perpetrators to face justice, but whereas Woodward and Bernstein can barely grasp the ramifications of what they're reporting, even when their investigation has identified the White House Chief of Staff as being guilty of criminal conspiracy, there's only parlor game questions left about what our sitting president does and doesn't know. In a weird way I found myself envying them.
Given the recent revelations about Dustin Hoffman's harassment of women on set, his turn as Bernstein is even more awkward to watch than it was before--there are more than a few scenes where he, with his more free-wheeling reporting style, is trying to pressure female witnesses into telling him what they know and/or go on the record about it, and it's impossible now to watch those scenes and not wonder how much the women were really acting acutely uncomfortable, as opposed to just being acutely uncomfortable. I found myself thinking of Spotlight, predictably, because it's the other great newspaper movie and because it shares many of the same concerns, and one which pays homage to this one but also plays off the expectations that this one generates. Towards the end, I also realized that a key scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is also a direct tip of the hat to one of the final scenes in this movie, which makes what Winter Soldier tries and fails to do even clearer. Spotlight is about complicity; All the President's Men is about conspiracy, and how much work it takes to pull at the few loose threads the conspirators left dangling. Both, ultimately, reinforce that there's no substitute in journalism for persistence.
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Date: 2017-11-10 02:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-11-10 06:57 (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2017-11-11 06:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-01 11:01 (UTC)Hi, followed you back here, hope that's okay.
I highly rec The Final Days (if you haven't read it already by now), and am in fact currently rereading it; it's a fascinating and grimly compelling account of the march to the end, told from inside Nixon's circle (because apparently pretty much everyone was willing to talk on "deep background" after that).
It doesn't pick up quite where ATPM ends -- it opens with Nixon's lawyers flying to Key Biscayne in Nov 1973 to try to advise him to resign, and there's some backfilling of relevant info, but there are important events that aren't covered in detail in either book.
I feel people should be handing out copies to Trump aides. *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2017-11-13 10:01 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-11-16 20:17 (UTC)