Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch All the President's Men
1976 · Alan J. Pakula · All the President's Men on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Compare the newsroom's flat overhead light with the garage scenes. (light)
Willis keeps the fluorescent grid, green cast and all, so the newsroom stays merciless and bright. In the garage he lets faces fall into black and builds compositions out of what he refuses to light.
Payoff: The film sorts its two worlds by light. Work happens where everything is visible. Information moves where you cannot see a face. In the reading: expressionism (light-shadow gradient). Light and shadow used as forces rather than description is what the reading calls expressionism, the gradient between what is shown and withheld.
Count the phone calls that end without an answer. (structure)
Approach, refusal, partial disclosure, repeat. Wolfe cuts scenes off on inconclusiveness rather than on resolution, and the middle hour is built from that cycle. Nobody gets a breakthrough on schedule.
Payoff: The suspense sits in the distance between suspecting something and proving it. That gap is where the whole film lives. In the reading: action-image (small form). Small acts that disclose a hidden situation a piece at a time are what the reading calls the small form of the action-image.
Notice how rarely the camera gives you a close-up. (camera)
Pakula and Willis shoot wide and long-lensed, with the two reporters buried inside desks, colleagues, and the working machinery around them. The newsroom keeps being the largest thing in the frame.
Payoff: The institution is the character. Woodward and Bernstein are workers inside a system rather than heroes standing apart from it.
Listen for typewriters and phones running under every scene. (sound)
Shire's score arrives rarely and stays spare. What fills the track instead is the noise of a newspaper operating: keys, rings, voices, paper. The sound marks time and progress rather than mood.
Payoff: The ambient racket is doing structural work. You can hear how much has been done by how loud the room is.
Watch Robards decide how much of a story to print. (performance)
Bradlee conveys authority through economy, a flat sentence and a stare. Around him Hoffman plays Bernstein loose and intuitive while Redford plays Woodward careful and status-conscious. Neither hardens into a buddy-film type.
Payoff: The performances are behavior rather than characterization. You learn what these people are like by watching them work a problem.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the light the film refuses to give you. Everything it knows, it knows by withholding.