Day 67: All the President's Men (1976)

All the President's Men
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Starring: Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards

Historical dramas can be really boring. Often times, they focus so much on facts and events that they fail to entertain or capture the attention of your average audience. Every once in a while, though, they really manage to show just how exciting and important events of the past really were. This film was one of the latter. Much like Good Night and Good Luck (a favorite of mine), this movie showed how the hard work of a determined journalist can change the course of history.

Based on their own real best selling book, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are two no name journalists at the Washington Post who start investigating the Watergate break in with no information or connections. By slowly climbing a ladder of shaky contacts and anonymous sources, they trace the corruption all the way up to the White House itself.

Redford and Hoffman as charismatic as actors come. Watching these two guys in their prime bounce intense, technical dialogue off of each other at a lightning pace was great to watch. It was also cool to see two actors from 12 Angry Men working together again (Martin Balsam and Jack Warden). They real highlight, though, was Jason Robards (who got a much deserved Oscar for his performance). His challenging, but ultimately supportive relationship with his young journalists was fun to watch (as was his dirty mouthed dialogue).

This movie has a very meticulous script full of name dropping and complicated political connections. It doesn't worry much about catching up the audience and gives only as much information as we need to basically understand what is happening. We see this flurry of information as overwhelming (which it would have been for Woodward and Bernstein). It started out as very overwhelming and unengaging. However, once Woodward has his intense conversation with Dahlberg (which was filmed as six minutes of a single take of phone conversation with a slow zoom), the film takes off and it was impossible to not be drawn down the rabbit hole. The darkened conversations with number one anonymous source Deep Throat were especially adrenalyn pumping.

I would recommend this movie to anyone who is interested in political conspiracy or in journalism. I wonder if this kind of hard working investigative journalism is still going on. I'm sure it is, but things like this get turned into books nowadays, not newspaper articles. I think we need people like Woodward and Bernstein to look into every administration that goes through the White House.

Lesson learned: Secrets, secrets, they're no fun. Secrets, secrets, hurt someone.