Running into dead ends with brick walls at every turn.

Rating: 10/10 (10 November 2012)

"Most people don't care about Watergate anymore", Washington Post boss Jason Robards tells his top two reporters, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, as this film begins its wrap up. But Hoffman and Redford, as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, do care, and they persevere, especially after Robards tells them to take 15 minutes off to rest, then get back out there and finish the job. The infamous "Deep Throat" (Hal Holbrook, seen in shadows, that fabulous profile still obvious) gives them enough information at first to get them intrigued, but as the two fairly decent journalists persevere to get the scoop of the century, they find that a lot of people in Washington who worked for the Committee to re-elect the President (Nixon) are not willing to even have a cup of coffee with them let alone risk their lives or careers by spilling the beans. The two however refuse to leave well enough alone, and end up blowing the men working for "Tricky Dick" out of the water.
Only days after our most recent presidential election, I re-watched this amazing drama which at 2 hours and 20 minutes is never boring. In this now classic political expose on the ruthlessness of government, it is the screenplay (by William Goldman based upon Bernstein and Woodward's book) who is the star, even though the two leading men are great in it and Robards deservedly won an Academy Award. Every word spoken by each actor rings true, and every action rings of honesty. Robards, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam and John McMartin are Woodward and Bernstein's colleagues at the paper, while an ensemble of some of the best character performers around fill out the cast. Nicolas Coaster, Polly Holliday, Jane Alexander, Allyn Ann McLearie and Sloane Shelton are just among the "real people" they encounter while discussing such real life famous people as John Mitchell, G. Gordon Liddy and H. R. Haldeman as visuals of Nixon, Spirow Agnew and Gerald Ford are seen in real news clips.
It is ironic that Hollywood released this film during the Bicentennial year to show how honesty and integrity will always be the goals of the people who elect the officials who make the decisions that guide our great country. Almost forty years later, politics is as dirty, if a bit more sinister, and the recent campaign reiterated what movies like "Advise and Consent" and "The Best Man" have been warning us about for years. Throw in "All the King's Men", "The Manchurian Candidate", "The Candidate" and "Bullworth" as other films of interest in this category. Films and plays about Nixon have exposed more about the man we only see through newsreels here. As long as writers dare to stand up to expose truth, politicians will always live in fear that their secrets will end up being exposed, as they are here.