Loud clacking of typewriter keys. Rotary dials turning on bakelite phones. White noise of teletype machines and anonymous voices. Rustling of paper, everywhere: books, files, newspapers, notepads on which one can almost hear the swift movement of pencils – beautiful pencils, adding touches of colour too, the yellow of Ticonderogas, the anthracite of Palominos. Feet (the editor’s) stretched out across the desk: legend has its postures. Overhead shots – Gordon Willis’ mastery – reveal, as if from another planet, the geometry of the “Post” newsroom, the concentric circles of the Library of Congress, rows of cars in the leaden silence of Washington. The atmosphere is unnatural. It feels as though an invasion of body snatchers were imminent. Instead, it’s simply the arrival of the bunch of inept spies who, in 1972, triggered the Watergate scandal, led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, and fed an already thriving obsession with conspiracy in American culture. Yet Alan J. Pakula is not that interested in paranoia (which he had already faced in The Parallax View), nor really in history itself. The film proceeds elliptical, methodical and slightly incomprehensible – unless you’re already well acquainted with the facts: outlined against an opaque background, what emerges is just the crusading journalistic drive that led the “Woodstein” duo to bring down an American presidency. Redford and Hoffman dash through the maze of desks, hair flying, sift through documents, press witnesses, house by house. They themselves seem to have no real home, nor life of their own – they are journalists, and as Jason Robards’s Ben Bradlee mutters through clenched teeth, “All that’s at stake here is just the freedom of the press and the future of the nation.” The film’s finest dramatic invention remains the dark space of the garage from which “Deep Throat” dispenses oracular hints: if you want the truth, “follow the money,” future generations would repeat (and they would almost always be proven right). All the President’s Men leverages its rhetoric and makes no appeal to emotion. And yet today, thinking of what the “Post” once was and what it is now, and of everything fearful and desolate all around, it is not easy to keep a certain despondency at bay.

Paola Cristalli