a tight ball of a mystery movie, gets better with more viewings

Rating: 10/10 (29 March 2006)

The first time I saw All the President's Men I wasn't very impressed or, actually, that involved. But it was also also at a time when I wasn't paying much attention to what was on the screen (school-time, middle of the day, that sort of thing). After seeing it a couple more times, and from reading more and more about the Watergate/Nixon involvement and impeachment, the film has a lot more importance for me, and it does work very well as mystery-movie entertainment. You have the investigators (here also journalists) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, working for the Washington Post, on their own digging into the break-in at the Watergate Hotel in 1972. But without much results over time they almost lose their case and story. Enter in 'Deep Throat', a special secretive informer for them, and some extra paranoia, and the case goes up a notch.
This is quite a film to see in the 21st century to see how, like with today's Good Night and Good Luck, how determined, concrete investigative journalism stirred up the system and the content being relevant to the time it was created. At the time it was released, however, I wonder if the connection was even stronger to the very recent events of a scandal being uncovered leading to the impeachment of Nixon. But aside from the content, there's also how the film is put together, and its really, like GN&GL, good movie-making for a mature, thinking audience. Robert Redford is in one of his best turns (even if one could say he's just being himself, which he often is anyway in films) as Woodward, with his scenes with Deep Throat in the parking garage exquisitely intense. Dustin Hoffman is equally good as Bernstein, the sort of other head of what the editor-in-chief (played very well by Jason Robards) called 'Woodstein'. The dialog in the script is dead-on, and the storytelling just piles on and piles on what works. If it doesn't grab attention right away it's not a crutch, but an incentive to stay along with the story and see it till it's end.