Review of All the President's Men (1976) by Kenneth L — 01 Nov 2010

This does have its own little special place in the American movie canon, but it's actually not the strongest movie in and of itself. It has some really great moments, but overall the film is trying to do too much too fast.

We watch Woodward and Bernstein pursue the leads in their investigation, but there's too much information presented in too cursory a fashion. We hear lots of names, we hear that this person did this to that person, but we actually see very few of the people talked about and the movie becomes a bewildering flurry of names and phone calls and stories being thrown at us.

It becomes virtually impossible to keep all of the names straight or figure out who had what position and why they mattered. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, both excellent actors, are certainly up to the film's acting challenge, but the challenge isn't actually that much - the only emotion they have to project is a dogged determination, and the characters aren't really developed at all.

Some of the side characters are more interesting, such as Jason Robards (who won a supporting actor Oscar for this) as the skeptical chief editor of the Post or especially Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.

I must admit that the Deep Throat scenes are little miniature classics unto themselves, with the darkness and the whispering and the empty garage - no wonder he's one of the main things people remember about this movie and the real life story.

The movie does capture the newspaper office environment really well (it actually won the art direction Oscar as well) - I saw this movie first when I was about 13, and the office was one of the only things I really remembered up to now.

I want to compare it to The Social Network, another fast-paced dialogue-driven fact-filled movie about very recent (relative to the film) public events. I actually think The Social Network is the better movie, because it managed to throw tons of information at us AND involve us emotionally in a way I don't think All the President's Men does.

This is another classic document of the 1970s, and its pretty much defined how most people will think about Watergate from now on, but just as a movie, it's not the best thing ever.