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The screen at the start is a blank page, lashed with giant letters à la Citizen Kane. A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters is the tip of the iceberg, thus Watergate as a case of "rat-fucking" on a national scale pieced together by shaggy Washington Post cubs. To "get something on paper" is the goal, it has Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) bouncing from one evasive phone call and spooked informant to the next. Not the onward investigative momentum of Costa-Gavras, say, but rather a rubato of repetitions and frustrations, a notebook of notes and doodles scratched and occasionally linked—the trail often goes cold in the face of "non-denial denials" and a city full of frightened people. Editors (Jack Warden, Martin Balsam) alternate skepticism with support, the publisher (Jason Robards) puts his feet up on the desk and pulls out the red pen. Deep Throat is a subterranean specter cut in the shape of Hal Holbrook, a lit cigarette tip with a marked distaste for newspapers: "I don't care for inexactitude and shallowness." Alan J. Pakula's procedural-thriller is a drama of light and darkness, in other words a Gordon Willis drama. (Phosphorescence and shadows comprise the ultimate Seventies palette.) The camera is keenly attuned to the tenacious accumulation of information, staring overhead to give the concentric circles of the machinations, dollying slowly into a close-up as crucial pieces of evidence are juggled, tracking rapidly for the elation of a confirmed source. The grinding side of espionage, "a good, solid piece of American journalism," a Hawksian account of professionals exceeding at their trade. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Seven Days in May, Alphaville. The ending is anticlimactic the way history is anticlimactic, still the cannonades at Nixon's inauguration can't compete with the sound of typewriters at work. With Jane Alexander, Stephen Collins, Ned Beatty, Robert Walden, Meredith Baxter, Penny Fuller, John McMartin, Lindsay Crouse, Valerie Curtin, F. Murray Abraham, and Frank Wills.
--- Fernando F. Croce |