Since this month is pretty light on things leaving HBO Max, my viewing has been a little more scattershot of late. Instead of worrying about what's about to leave, I've checked out movies on other services, or just about anything that caught my eye. Last weekend it was Everything Everywhere All At Once (which was pretty ace) and this weekend I'm rewatching All the President's Men.
The only other time I watched it was back in 2005, on one of the first weekends I was at journalism school. They wanted to show us an idealized version of one of American journalism's greatest hits, presumably to inspire us to reach the same kinds of heights as Woodward and Bernstein. I don't know if it necessarily worked at that goal, but it did inculcate a love in me for movies about journalism.
For one thing, I like the procedural aspect of it. You've got Woodward and Bernstein chasing down leads bit by bit, sometimes doorstepping a contact, other times working the phones. You see them taking calls at all hours of the day, grabbing food in between meetings, and getting yelled at by their editor for not having enough to go on. So from that perspective, it really does do what my J-school was hoping to communicate, which is the detail work and the tenacity needed to land an investigation.
The other journalism movie I can think of that showed the legwork to the same degree is Spotlight, which I think I'm due for a rewatch as well. That said, I also have a big soft spot for the Post, which is less about the procedural, nitty gritty of journalism and more a high-minded discussion of what the press is for. Probably have to rewatch that one as well.
Now, the main thing that those two more recent movies are missing is the weird naturalism of 70s movies that pervades All the President's Men. Part of it is technological, like when Woodward and Bernstein are driving in a car at night, and they drive through a deep enough shadow that the screen goes completely black, though you still hear their voices. Even into the 80s and 90s, filmmaking technology couldn't cope with dim lighting the way it can now, although clearly the director of this film probably wanted that shot to look natural, to the point of sacrificing the visuals. I don't think a modern film would get away with that.
Then there's the sound production. You have a lot of background hum, whether from whatever's happening in the shot or just the noise the microphones picked up back in the 70s. My favorite moment, though, is when Bernstein's talking to a source outside and a jet flies past, making the two characters have to shout. I can only assume that's on purpose, possibly even to evoke what happened when the real Carl Bernstein was having that actual conversation, but once again, you can't imagine a heavily curated and managed film in 2022 having that same feeling of artful sloppiness.
This is a thing that's always fascinated me about movies from the 70s. You start to see it in the late 60s, not only when New Hollywood directors were coming up but even in something like Bullitt, where shots were deliberately staged differently than they might have been just a decade earlier. The framing of shots and the way sound is recorded are deliberately done poorly (like lens flares), to make things seem more natural. There's also an odd quality to the way lines are delivered, which you wouldn't hear in movies now, again probably to sound more like how people were thought to speak.
It's gone by the 80s, where shots are framed in more traditional ways, although the first Superman film with Christopher Reeves, from 1978, is also shot in that more straightforward style, so it might be a question of what fits the content, too. I have to say, though, as odd as the framing and sound mixing are in movies from that era, I never quite get tired of it, even if the special effects aren't as good as now.
The other striking thing about watching All the President's Men in 2022 is how little has changed, and how much. We've just spent the summer watching hearings about a president's criminal misdeeds (the January 6 insurrection), and read about an entirely different set of misdeeds (the improper handling of classified material at Mar-A-Lago), so that's how little has changed - dishonest president doing dishonest things.
What's different, of course, is the willingness of said dishonest president's own party to condemn him. All the President's Men makes a point of having various Republican characters denounce what the Committee to Re-Elect the President was doing with regard to the Watergate break-in. I can't imagine future movies made about the current era being able to find quite as many Republicans willing to criticize Donald Trump, witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson notwithstanding. Especially when you consider that a lot of these supposed Republican critics of Trump are on record as saying they'd vote for him again.
I don't want to say that the events depicted in All the President's Men seem quaint in comparison to thousands of yahoos storming the Capitol, because going by the portrayal onscreen in that movie, the burglars hired by Nixon's people were just as incompetent as Trump's coterie. And one has to remember, the first time Trump was impeached was for doing stuff to undermine his rival, just like Nixon was doing. Still, it's not quite the same as whipping up a mob to kill your own vice-president and disrupt the electoral process.
Though if that security guard Frank Wills hadn't discovered the break-in, who knows what Nixon might have unleashed later on in his second term?
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