Review: All the President's Men

I was flipping channels Saturday night and came across a showing of All the President's Men. The film tells the story of the investigation of the Watergate Hotel break-in by a group of burglars who became linked to President Nixon. Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) are the pair of investigative reporters who take on the story and follow the leads. They are helped by a number of sources including the mysterious-no-longer Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook).

Roger Ebert was called it the quintessential newspaper movie. It goes into exhaustive detail about the process of investigative journalism. The whole of the movie is a quest to get a source, a confirmation of the source, and get the information into print. Along the way there are various conversations about the ethics of using unnamed sources that have a different slant for today's audience.

As I watched, I was struck with a profound disappointment. The story itself was interesting but only in that I knew what the end result was. The movie ends having just kicked over the first of the dominoes that ended with the resignation of the president. But there isn't really the sense to the casual observer that that is what happened. The end three-shot of Nixon's inaugration and Woodward and Bernstein at their typewriters is interesting, but doesn't provide any sort of finality. The movie just ends with the teletype displaying the next in the series of big headlines.

An interesting HITG (Hey Its That Guy)- Sloan, the head of finance, is played by Stephen Collins of 7th heaven. His wife is played by Meredith Baxter, who would go on to be Elyse Keaton on Family Ties.