What is it?

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2010)

"All the President's Men" is, of course, an apparently factual depiction of Woodward and Bernstein's famous investigation that broke open the Watergate scandal between 1972 and 1974 (although the film just covers the initial reporting up to tying senior White House aids to a secret slush fund). As a movie, however, it's not so easy to pin down what exactly it is.
It's not a typical Hollywood thriller, despite essentially having thriller pacing. It's not a detective story, since the film is clearly made with the expectation that every member of the audience already knows what the reporters are going to find out. It's not exactly a documentary, so perhaps this is close to being a docudrama. To the credit of the movie, they don't do typical Hollywood things like invent a romantic subplot or add fanciful elements of government assassins coming after the reporters, as one would imagine Hollywood would be inclined to do. This is just 2 hours of reporters reporting, no attempt was made at making this movie include "something for everyone", which was probably a good idea.
Robert Redford steals the show as Woodward, pure and simple. In many ways his natural acting (and I'm sure, his good looks) smooth over the plot which is difficult to follow due to its sheer complexity. Redford is always sure you feel drawn in even if you can't follow exactly which name he's talking about in a given scene. With an actor who didn't make nearly everyone like him, this movie could have been classified as a boring, dated relic and not of much interest to modern audiences. As it is, though, the movie is still very much worth watching if you have even the vaguest interest in Watergate or the 1970s in general, and a lot of that is due to Redford's work here.
The rest of the film is okay, providing a decent depiction of some parts of the Watergate scandal. I suppose the entire thing was too complicated to ever fit into a single movie, but as this film as basically become the official version most people believe, it is a bit troubling that the movie doesn't spend a single moment addressing why any of what's going on is going on. The movie leaves us with this impression of government agents being evil just to get their guy reelected, and reporters and government whistle-blowers exposing it just because they want the truth to be known, when in reality everyone, from the editors at the Post to Deep Throat, had much more nuanced motivations (although only a select few could have guessed at Deep Throat's motivations when this movie was made). Still, 2 of those people (Woodward in Bernstein) were involved in making the movie.
Political concerns aside, it's a decent piece of cinema, and a wonderful time capsule of what America was feeling at this time. If this sort of thing interests you at all, it is very much worth a rental.