Tense, Brilliant, and Endlessly Watchable

Rating: 9/10 (14 January 2002)

I'm a Watergate junkie. I admit it. In fact, I'm a Nixon junkie. So, obviously, I love this movie to bits. But apart from feeding my thirst for Watergate, this also happens to be a very well-made film.
The script is marvellous, for instance. There is some really great dialogue in here, and the focus is much broader than simply Watergate. I was watching the film the other day and noting with admiration the way the film provides its own historical context so well. There they are, discussing the very ABM treaty that our current president has just decided to scrap. The fact that the script takes such pains to make the viewer aware of what are the "big stories" at the Post (especially before the Watergate story becomes a big story itself) add immensely to the realism the picture. Why would the Foreign Editor, for instance, care about Watergate. He wouldn't, and in this film, he doesn't. But he doesn't act like the minor character he so obviously is. In those meetings, he's a major character. Think about it... if you were the Foreign Editor at the Post, you'd probably think and act like a major character too. It's details like that... making sure a character behaves as his real-world counterpart might, even when it doesn't directly serve the story, that makes this picture so much broader than Watergate.
Because at root, it isn't about Watergate. It's about Woodward and Bernstein's investigation of Watergate. Huge difference. The important details become, not setting the context of the White House where these things happened, but setting the context of the Post where the investigation took place. The story of Watergate can be told in many ways (there have been some great documentaries, and Stone's "Nixon" touches on the subject), but this is the only way to tell the story of the "Woodstein" invesitgation.
It's easy to praise this film by talking about how important it is, but I think many reviewers often fail to mention just how good a movie it really is.