Momentous Disclosures / Soon to be undermined by Gerald Ford

Rating: 6/10 (2 May 2009)

Some people choose this as their favorite movie ever made, and while it's about something very important, it's a little too self-important. It's topic and theme are rousing. But it's two and a quarter hour running time suggests too much self-regard. It has nothing going for it in terms of filmic ideas. It's just a narrative. It kind of toys with some tension-building cross-cuts borrowed from The Manchurian Candidate; political progress is being made by the incorrigible as the truth is ferreted out. But the movie really fails to convey the exciting, outraged hub-bub of scandalized American population watching the trickle of these developments. Viewers who admire this prefer clear moral lines, and are pleased by journalists portrayed as knights in shining armor. But we've seen despicable journalists using the media for evil only too recently. It was a short trip from The Pentagon Papers to Judith Miller, Robert Novak, Fox News; and other sub-human individuals willing to foist partisan PR on the nation, as a smoke screen to advance personal causes.
Almost 4 decades of GOP underhandedness began here with Karl Rove waiting in the wings. And Ford's complicity and inability to recognize the crimes, created an urge in the GOP to do it all over again, only at a more grotesque scale, which was realized with the Bush/Cheney Whitehouse.