“The Washington Post” reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that leads to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Robert Redford as Bob Woodward star in a superb political thriller, made all the more compelling because it is based on the front pages of the Washington Post in its heyday. The story largely begins with the attempted break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel in 1972. Operatives associated with the Nixon administration were caught and arrested while burglarizing and planting bugs in the now-famous building.
What begins as a somewhat routine D.C. metro story about a burglary – assigned to Woodward – becomes perhaps the most significant political scandal of the 20th century in the U.S. For the 21st century, it’s possible that we’re living right in the middle of the next one. Only time will tell on that score.
For a significant portion of the movie, Woodward and Bernstein are voices in the wilderness. Particularly at first, few other major newspapers carried their news stories. One of the editors, played by John McMartin, even asks managing editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) where the Washington Post suddenly gets the monopoly on wisdom. As the paper’s foreign editor, McMartin even goes so far as to say that he doesn’t believe the story because it makes no sense to him, given the way George McGovern was self-destructing on his own during the 1972 campaign. In the end, however, the reporting team prevailed. Decades later, Woodward and Bernstein maintain a solid reputation in the journalistic community, if only because they are right far more often than not.
As the lead actors Hoffman and Redford quibble back and forth, trying to separate fact from supposition, they start to sound like an old married couple, pointing each other’s peccadillos. Hoffman as Bernstein, the more seasoned reporter, complains that Redford’s Woodward isn’t aggressive enough at extracting information from sources. By contrast, Woodward seems to relish the voice of reason in opposition to Bernstein’s overassertive interview tactics.
Of the many staff members at the Committee to Re-elect the President that Woodward and Bernstein try to interview, almost no one is willing to speak on or off the record. The members appear either intimidated by larger forces or else simply disdainful at the lack of “loyalty” by the reporters – not for the freedom of the press or to the Constitution but rather loyalty to the famous personalities and people in power. For additional insight into the past and present, one only needs to observe the tattoo of Richard Nixon as a tribute on the back of Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, who was issued a full pardon in 2020.
Mark Felt, played by Hal Holbrook, was the deputy director of the FBI during the Watergate inquiry and has since been identified as Deep Throat, the confidential source for Woodward, only revealed thirty years later in 2005. Felt was in a unique position to review information compiled on the Watergate incident before Acting Director L. Patrick Gray was privy to it. As such, and because of his friendship with Woodward, Felt was able to help guide the young reporter through the machinations of the Nixon White House – events that now seem tame compared to the current administration.
Screenwriter William Goldman, who adapted the screenplay from the Woodward and Bernstein book, won his second Academy Award. His first was for Best Original Screenplay for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which sold for $400,000 – an astronomical sum at the time. Controversy surrounded Goldman’s adapted script, which discarded approximately half the book – not at all unusual for film adaptations of novel-length books. There’s just too much content in most 400-page books for barely over two hours of screen time. I think that’s one reason we are seeing the limited series format adapted for novels – typically consisting of seven to ten episodes in an equivalent number of hours – resonating so well with audiences on venues like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Apple TV, and others that can accommodate longer features in a household setting as opposed to what folks can tolerate in theaters.
Neither Robert Redford, Carl Bernstein, nor Bob Woodward was happy with Goldman’s first draft. In response, Bernstein and his girlfriend at the time, Nora Ephron, developed their own version. As a gross understatement, Goldman was not at all happy, and his thoughts are well-documented in his book “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” Nonetheless, also in Goldman’s book, Ephron later offered her apology, which he readily and frankly magnanimously accepted.
The actual events in the book “All the President’s Men” are complex and would have presented a challenge to anyone adapting it to the screen. Director Alan J. Pakula and Redford (who owned the film rights) spent significant time reworking the script to improve its clarity. Pakula’s chops boast a solid record of making intricate political thrillers, including “The Parallax View,” “Presumed Innocent,” and “The Pelican Brief.” Further, the excellent supporting cast includes Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Jane Alexander, Meredith Baxter, Ned Beatty, Stephen Collins, and even Best Actor Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham as Arresting Officer #1 when the Watergate break-in was discovered. All of the pieces come together nicely by the closing credits.
There’s potentially a lot to say about the production and a lot of angles in which to approach the film adaptation of Bernstein’s and Woodward’s book. Roger Ebert, for example, focused on narrative’s lack of drama and its relationship to films like “His Girl Friday” starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, based on the 1928 play “The Front Page,” written by legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht along with Charles MacArthur, and directed by Howard Hawks. The play and film had largely influenced how American audiences viewed the press for years, until they were finally contemporized by “All the President’s Men.” Other critics have come from other directions, with some saying that the movie would spark greater interest among college students in the study of journalism, chiefly the investigative kind. At the end of the day, “All the President’s Men” is a cerebral film, like it or not.
Present-day audiences may find the film’s pacing somewhat languid, but arguably, it’s a necessary feature in relating a story with so many real-life characters committing so many unforced errors. As Holbrook intones in the bowels of a dark parking garage to Woodward, “Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House. The truth is, they’re not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” These days, such revelations seem a lot less remarkable, unfortunately.
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