All the President's Men 1976

[7.5/10] There’s something refreshingly dry about All the President’s Men. After a slate of Oscar-aspiring, newspaper-fawning films in recent years that include over the top moments, people banging their fists on the table, and Awards reel monologues, there’s something downright pleasant about this film’s contrary approach.

All the President’s Men is not about noble, eloquent heroes standing up for truth, justice, and the American way. It’s not about pure-hearted do-gooders cracking open life-changing stories with a ready-made speech about their importance. It’s not about the impossibly sharp newsmen setting aside convenience and doing what’s right.

Or rather it is about all of these things, but it makes that point all the more effective by subsuming it in the way the film is about two regular reporters just doing the work of breaking the story. There are few dramatic moments in All the President’s men and when they come, they tend to be brief and reflected in reactions or urgency rather than highlighted by the dialogue. Instead, the film gives itself over to the unglamorous, day-in/day-out shoe-leather work that it takes to crack even stories big enough to take down an entire Presidential administration.

The film does that through telling the story of Woodward and Bernstein, the duo from the Washington Post who, in conjunction with the infamous Deep Throat, helped turn a break-in at the Watergate into a scandal that eventually ended the Nixon presidency. It traces their work on the story from the initial, courtroom questions and unexpected figures present, to the interviews and secretive source gathering, to the info-collection and struggles to confirm their suspicions in a way that makes the story fit to print.

The best thing to say about the film is that it romanticizes the newspaper industry by being unromantic about it. There’s no gauzy hues or lofty score to signal to the audience that this is important, courageous work. Instead, All the President’s Men just shows Woodward and Bernstein doing their jobs: running down leads, pressing their sources for more info, finding creative ways to get people to talk or at least affirm their hypotheses.

The film makes that work engaging by showing its protagonists being both determined and clever. There is a doggedness to the famous journalistic duo that permeates the film. While there’s a little of the cop movie style, “Just get me some results!!!” gruff skepticism from their editor, the movie mostly depicts the pair as simply believing in the story, believing that they’re on to something worth pursuing, and wearing out their shoes and their telephones and their typewriters trying to capture it.
But it also shows them having to rely on their wits (and a bit of slyness) as much as their perseverance to get the info they need. It’s crafty when the pair try to protect their sources, try to give them plausible deniability about talking to them, by simply asking them whether they would negate the detail the Post plans to run with. It’s sharp when Bernstein puts on the “if you don’t say anything, I’ll call it a conformation” bit of kabuki theater to nail down a key fact. And it’s compelling when he takes the mere offer of a coffee and a cigarette to extend his presence in the home of a government employee who said she didn’t want to talk and uses it to glean some key details in the case.

Aside from the obvious parallels to present day journalistic scoops, that’s the other main area where All the President’s Men seems to stand out for 2019. There’s several scenes like that, where Woodward and Bernstein insinuate themselves in a young woman’s life to get the story, with a forcefulness and imputed authority that feels a little uncomfortable forty years later, even if it’s likely part for the course for a film from the 1970s.

That said, that’s the other knock against the film. Given that it was released two years after Nixon’s resignation, the details of the story were likely still fresh in the minds of audiences who saw it in theater. But decades later, even those who know the general details of the Post’s investigation and Watergate scandal are likely to walk away a little confused about the finer details. All the King’s Men throws around names and dates and actions in a staccato fashion with next to no guidance for the viewer as to the byzantine theories and conspiracies at play. The broad strokes are easily comprehensible, but in a movie about reporters nailing down the details, those key revelations and uncovered identities don’t travel as well to the modern day as they did in 1976.

And at times, the matter-of-fact dryness of the film starts to wear over the course of a two-hour film. Again, unraveling the convoluted details of the Nixon administration’s efforts to thwart its political opponents involves an army of names and dates and a dozen conversation with various sources, many of whom fit more of the civil servant personality than that of a charismatic performer. That adds to the realism of the presentation but can also make things feel flatter as a piece of cinema.

That extends to the cinematography. There’s a few camera flourishes in the film. There’s the famed snail zoom on Woodward that helps convey the paranoid tension of the moment, some frenetic tracking shots and quick cuts through the newsroom to help convey the sense of urgency to some part of the story, and a closing framing of Woodward and Bernstein tapping away while Nixon is inaugurated laden with the import of the juxtaposition. But the film more typically opts for static shots with flat lighting that lead to the wave of beige and gray that washes over the film.

Still, there’s an advantage to that over otherwise florid, purple prose-filled Oscar bait pictures that cover similar territory. All the King’s Men earns its sterling reputation not just from committed, naturalistic performances from leading lights like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, but from its “just the facts”-style presentation that venerates the everyday work of these newsmen by choosing *not * to use the flashier tools in the cinematic toolbox to put them on a pedestal, and instead letting their work speak for itself.