Or, How We Undid It

It is inevitably frustrating to deal with a film about an episode as conducive to emotional outbursts, historical theorizing, patriotic high blood pressure, and binges of cynicism as “the Watergate mess.” The simple question “Is it a good movie?” cannot be answered without seeming to take an extra-aesthetic stand. I remember not thinking much of Vittorio De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis and promptly having to field accusations of callousness regarding the plight of Italian Jews under Fascism. Similarly, when something called Sounder moved white audiences to empty buckets of tears over the nearest dry black family, noble hound dog and all, my resistance to its treacly, fraudulent posturing was interpreted as a sudden disaffection with the NAACP.

All the President’s Men runs the risk of creating the same kind of critical problem. An astute filmgoer who incidentally believes that the fall of the Nixon regime was an unjustifiable putsch engineered by sinister forces will be made extremely uncomfortable simply because an honest critical perception must acknowledge that this is a superior screen achievement. Of course, Nixon-haters need not worry. For them the film is a feast, and their political convictions will not be undermined by any cooler counterreactions to All the President’s Men as pure movie. It should be added in all honesty that this time I am home free. As someone whose sanctimony-allergic gorge rose for good during the first national epidemic of Nixonitis back in 1952, I suffer no inner struggle over the merit of form versus the virtue of content.

HP

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Harvey E. Phillips

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It is inevitably frustrating to deal with a film about an episode as conducive to emotional outbursts, historical theorizing, patriotic high blood pressure, and binges of cynicism as “the Watergate mess.” The simple question “Is it a good movie?” cannot be answered without seeming to take an extra-aesthetic stand. I remember not thinking much of Vittorio De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis and promptly having to field accusations of callousness regarding the plight of Italian Jews under Fascism. Similarly, when something called Sounder moved white audiences to empty buckets of tears over the nearest dry black family, noble hound dog and all, my resistance to its treacly, fraudulent posturing was interpreted as a sudden disaffection with the NAACP.

All the President’s Men runs the risk of creating the same kind of critical problem. An astute filmgoer who incidentally believes that the fall of the Nixon regime was an unjustifiable putsch engineered by sinister forces will be made extremely uncomfortable simply because an honest critical perception must acknowledge that this is a superior screen achievement. Of course, Nixon-haters need not worry. For them the film is a feast, and their political convictions will not be undermined by any cooler counterreactions to All the President’s Men as pure movie. It should be added in all honesty that this time I am home free. As someone whose sanctimony-allergic gorge rose for good during the first national epidemic of Nixonitis back in 1952, I suffer no inner struggle over the merit of form versus the virtue of content.