So, this movie has one big thing going for it: It’s a really good period piece about what a newsroom in the ’70s looked like — the absurd mechanics of literally typing stories out on typewriters and putting them in baskets on people’s desks; the difficulty of doing basic research like “who is this person whose name I know, and how can I get in touch with them” by having to dig through piles of phone books, the massive amounts of calling people on landlines that you had to do (and the part where everyone actually answers the phone all the time… movie magic, or was the world actually that way?).

But of course when it came out in 1976 (two years after Nixon’s resignation, so almost contemporary with the events it’s describing), being a retrolicious snapshot of an ancient era’s tech wasn’t its appeal at all. Its appeal was… actually, I don’t know what it was. Creating heroes out of sordid political events, so that America could have Good Guys that could be seen to Uphold the Ideals of Our Nation?

Because as a movie, there’s honestly not much there. William Goldman wrote the script, and there are moments when the dialogue feels sharp, but… fundamentally, it’s really hard to make an exciting story out of this. Woodward and Bernstein call people up; they say weaselly things and lie unconvincingly. They go badger people in person, and the people are annoyed and some of them don’t say stuff and some of them foolishly say stuff. Librarians give out info they absolutely should not be giving out, and secretaries just offer all kinds of information to anyone who calls them out of the blue. Their editor is like “we need more proof!” Repeat for two hours.

The only genuinely dramatic thing is Deep Throat, who is basically Cigarette Smoking Man from the X-Files (I realize the inspiration must have worked the other way). Meeting a shadowy figure via elaborate subterfuges in a parking garage, where he gives cryptic hints and intimates warnings of implausible and never-materializing danger is the only conventionally dramatic thing to happen in the movie (and the thing that has warped modern views of investigative journalism, where people think that any facts you can find without that kind of cloak-and-dagger spy shit must not be secret enough to be bad).

Beyond that, the narrative arc isn’t even satisfying, because they don’t bring down the President in this movie. At the end of the movie, they’re like “welp, most people don’t even know what Watergate is despite us working this story for months now, and Nixon just got re-elected, but I guess let’s keep at it,” and then there’s a headline montage of people actually getting taken down and Nixon resigning years later (the movie takes place in ’72; Nixon resigns in ‘74, apparently).

I don’t see why this is on the AFI list, and I don’t understand why it’s so well-known. It’s a bland nothing of a movie; you’d think it would resonate in these times (the podcast people picked this back in 2019 when Trump’s impeachment was going on), but it’s not even remotely resonant and has nothing to offer us as we go through our own Constitutional crisis.