All the President’s Men 🎥 was a rewatch for me. And as I said in 2022, ‘Why did they end it there?’
Woodward and Bernstein break the Watergate story, and ‘follow the money’ all the way to the top of the US political establishment, and it’s great. But then the last bit, the guilty pleas, convictions, and sentencing, is laid out in a few seconds on a newsroom teleprinter.
That last point, as a device, is good, and perfectly valid as a way of summarising the fates of the perpetrators. My problem is that just before that we’ve seen the investigative duo at their lowest point, the Washington Post itself in danger, and everything seems to be falling apart. Then we switch to Nixon’s second inauguration playing on the newsroom TV while the work still goes on in the background, and then that teleprinter.
It wouldn’t be necessary, and could have appeared triumphalist, if the film had shown the entire story to the fall of Nixon. But ending it at that exact point seems odd. True, there is some pleasing irony in the juxtaposition between inauguration and the work going on that leads to the fall. But it just feels kind of thin to me.
But Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman manage to be compelling, even exciting, in a couple of hours of making phone calls and driving around ill-lit streets. So it’s still a great movie.