All the President's Men

It’s amazing how some movies feel dated, and others feel appropriate of the time. Rocky and A Nightmare On Elm Street, even though they take place in the 70’s and early 80’s, don’t feel dated at all. They feel natural for their time and place, and you never feel like the era in which they occur is holding back the movie or exposing flaws. Compare that to Rocky IV, with its Cold War propaganda and shoehorning in a robot for no good reason. Or the Elm Street remake, which relies on tacky cinematography and CGI that was very in vogue at the time and is now painful to watch. All The President’s Men manages to do both. It is a timeless story, because it literally couldn’t be told at any other point in time, since it’s, you know, REAL LIFE. The dogged pursuit by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of a seemingly throwaway incident involving some burglars at a hotel ends up unraveling a massive, years-long conspiracy that brings down the President of the United States, is fascinating history. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, to no one’s surprise, are fantastic as the two intrepid reporters that keep pulling at strings until the entire tapestry falls apart. And the supporting cast is equally excellent, especially Jason Robards as their editor in chief, who at first doesn’t trust the rookie reporters, but is won over by their dogged pursuit and how they keep backing up their hunches with facts. But simultaneously, the movie suffers from its topic and time it was made. Released in 1976, Watergate was only two years in the rear view. Names like Howard Hunt and G Gordon Liddy and John Mitchell were fresh on the hearts and minds of people back then. ATPM doesn’t spend a lot of time introducing a lot of the names and players, or even putting faces to them, since the scandal was so close in proximity to the movie. It assumes you know them, because, this came out, everybody did know them. The problem now is that, unless you possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the scandal and it’s many, MANY participants (69 people would face criminal indictment), you can and will get lost connecting the dots. It robs the movie of momentum and dulls the scope of the conspiracy, because so much of it is just mentioned in passing, and that robs the impact a new viewer will have. All these historical names just end up blending together. Who is Ehrlichman? Who is Sloan? Hell, the movie doesn’t even really show you how it connects back to Nixon. You know, THE PRESIDENT. It makes me feel like I should’ve done homework. It was still well acted and interesting. But because it is so reliant on the freshness of the wound filling in the blanks — or the viewer having a comprehensive subject matter expert — it’s hard to recommend the movie. It’s good for what it was, but what it is now requires you to do a lot of heavy lifting.