It's okay, but feels like a chapter of a longer story that would have been more interesting in its entirety

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2016)

This movie is okay. A lot of people said Spotlight came close to being as good as this, personally I found Spotlight a lot more high-stakes and exciting. This movie feels too much like an excerpt from a much larger story. Deep Throat is already a known associate of Woodward, most of the fallout from the story happens after the credits roll and a lot of what we see is the interviews with a myriad of supporting players we can't possibly remember.
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford make a pretty good team, though I felt their working relationship was underwritten. Redford is too confident and assured to be the character constantly dismiss as a rookie. The acting makes up for it, especially the hard work the two great actors put in to memorising each others lines. This allows the two to constantly interrupt each other just like real journalists would when breaking this story. A feeling of scriptedness would have killed the magnetic atmosphere Pakula creates.
Of the supporting cast, there's not much to note (which is somewhat shocking considering that there's two Oscar nominees and a win in here). Jason Robards gets a few nice moments as Ben Bradlee, but he's got none of the depth John Slattery brought to Bradlee Jr. in Spotlight and certainly none of the drama brought by Burt Young and Burgess Meredith in Rocky, who Robards beat for the Oscar that year. Jane Alexander has one "oh yeah, I can see some acting there", but her eight minute part is incredibly forgettable and inexplicably nominated.
There's a couple of fantastic lines of dialogue, but for the most part the story is very difficult to follow. We're chasing this lead now, now we're chasing a guy who had something to do with the guy who had something to do with the thing we were just talking about. Pakula struggles to keep the energy up in low-tension scenes of Woodward and Bernstein chatting in restaurants or on porches, and especially during one too many "its not enough" scenes where the story gets rejected.
However, Pakula's direction of the Watergate infiltration in the opening is stunningly tense, I jumped at least twice. I loved the use of sound, whether it be the constant hammering of typewriter keys to keep energy up or the flicker of a cigarette lighter to get Woodward's attention. The cinematography of Gordon Willis is a key part of the film's suspense and high stakes, especially the gorgeous lighting (and lack thereof) on Deep Throat's face and the placement of Nixon addresses with Woodward and Bernstein working furiously in the background.
When the film closes, not a lot has been done. We don't get to see the fallout, only the procedure. I'd much rather re-read The Pelican Brief or watch Spotlight to see journalism at its most thrilling. What we get here is competent but a bit boring too often.