Superlative

Rating: 10/10 (5 August 2002)

I first read this story when it was serialized in Playboy, with neatly understated illustrations by Punchatz, one of America's premiers. I read the book too, after having kept one ear on the TV hearings. I couldn't follow any of it. I gathered that most of the pols involved were liars and cheats, but what else was new? So when this film appeared I attended it at Tanforan Mall in South San Francisco, hoping that the details would be logically laid out.
No dice. I still couldn't follow it. Information was introduced into the story coming out of nowhere. What's the big deal about shredding at CREEP? Wouldn't they habitually shred all the used documents routinely. What I got instead of an exercise in ratiocination was a character study with a convoluted mystery background, kind of like Raymond Chandler without the Weltschmertz.
And what a splendid study it is! Redford has never been better. The part of mid-Western WASP Woodward fits him perfectly. Tall, methodical, truthful even at his own expense, his acting is effectively minimal. He rolls his eyes at exactly the right moments. Redford stands in contrast to Hoffman's Bernstein, a short, dark, wiry, pushy Jewish macher who seems not to walk but to dart from place to place. Yet neither of them plays a stereotype; they invest their parts with genuinely differentiated personalities.
The rest of the cast, down to the smallest bits, could not be improved upon. And what a cast! The cynical, tough, courageous, profane Ben Bradlee. He hands the manuscript back to Woodstein and strides away between the rows of empty desks in the newsroom, banging his knuckles lightly on one as he passes. Robards outdoes himself. Jack Warden and Martin Balsam are equally fine. (Did they reminisce about working together so closely in "Twelve Angry Men" fifteen or so years earlier? Probably not.) Performers like Lindsay Crouse have only a few minutes of screen time, Jane Alexander only a bit more, but they are memorable. I'll avoid going over the story and just present in no special order some of the points I found so impressive.
At conferences in the Washington Post, all the editors are given to wisecracks, but they almost always check Bradlee's reactions out of the corner of their eyes.
The humor, and there is some, is both verbal and physical. When Redford comments during an interview that he is a Republican, Hoffman looks up and stares at him. Redford responds with a prototypical double take. During an amusing scene in which Bradlee is having a conversation with a defensive "frazzled" informant, ashes fall from Hoffman's cigarette onto the couch and an annoyed Redford brushes them onto the floor. Hoffman returns from his agonizing interview with Alexander and is even more hyper than usual because he is on a caffeine jag.
There is no music until half an hour into the film, and after that it is only insidiously introduced more often, mostly nothing more than variations on a minimal set of four minor notes.
There are practically no show-offy bravura shots, though the photography is outstanding. One shot is memorable. A crane lifts the camera above the heads of Redford and Hoffman as they work at a circular desk in the Library of Congress. It rises impossibly high. Then, a dissolve, and it rises even higher, slowly until it must be tucked into the library's dome hanging from pulleys. I checked out that room in the Library of Congress and can't imagine how else it was done. The layout of the floor comes to resemble the rose window of a cathedral.
The lighting varies from shadowy (but not underlighted) ominous scenes and sterile flourescence, sometimes, as in the garage scenes, combining both.
Weaknesses are hardly worth mentioning, but I guess I could have done without some of the repetitiousness. That their "lives are in danger" is mentioned four times, twice during the same conversation, as if to emphasize what really needs no emphasis. The "L, P, and M" business also is gone over too many times. None of that detracts from the film's many virtues.
What bothers me more about the story has nothing to do with the movie. After this story broke everyone seemed to want to be Woodward and Bernstein. The easiest way to do this was to go after big game. It established a new and perhaps unhealthy tradition in journalism. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a cripple. Yet, by common agreement, no shots of him in his wheelchair ever appeared in the media. For that matter, he had a comfortable menage a trois while he was in the White House, and no mention was made of it. Everyone knew about Kennedy's transgressions but they were considered a private matter in the early 1960s. Even a dullard like Eisenhower had Kay Sommersby.
That's all changed now and I'm not sure the change is for the better. Do we really care that a president can use a word like (expletive deleted) in a private conversation, or whether another defines "sexual relations" in a way that you or I might not? Or that another might have snorted coke during the wilder days of his youth? Do we really care? SHOULD we care?
The French were convulsed with laughter at us in the early 1970s. They're probably not laughing anymore.