A six-part TV miniseries based on John Ehrlichman’s roman à clef The Company, which thinly disguised many real-life figures in the
Nixon administration leading up to Watergate.
The story mostly jives with the historical record, but there are some
qualifying factors. Fresh out of prison,
Ehrlichman was surely in need of money and also interested in cleaning up his
public image from the overall tinge of corruption and arrogance shared by
nearly everyone involved in the scandal.
Most – like Bob Haldeman and Ron Ziegler – did this by writing their own
memoirs, which typically placed blame for things on everyone but
themselves. Henry Kissinger did it by
acting as a primary source for Woodward & Bernstein’s books, especially The Final Days, in which Kissinger
himself, conspicuously, goes virtually unmentioned. Ehrlichman’s novel allows him to present the
story as he likes but without any responsibility to back up his
assertions. Having said all that, the
movie version deserves to be judged on its own merits. I would have preferred perhaps a four-hour
film focusing entirely on the power players in action and deleting all of the
soap elements from their personal lives, which seem to have drifted in from an
abandoned Jacqueline Susann book. Otherwise,
though, it is fully enthralling and effective not as a searing drama but as an
almost Kubrick-like comedy-of-errors.
The characterizations are just over-the-top enough to accentuate the
elements of the ridiculous and pathetic.
As for the cast, it’s hard to imagine it being more perfect. If I could’ve made a paranoid political
thriller in the mid-late 70s, I’d want Jason Robards, Cliff Robertson, Robert
Vaughn and John Houseman in it, and that’s who we’ve got; (only Hal Holbrook
seems to be missing). Vaughn is a
stand-out as the Haldeman character, the president’s monstrous and abusive
Chief-of-Staff. But the show is really
stolen by Nicholas Pryor as a press aide who I assume is supposed to be Ron
Ziegler or a composite. Sweating and
grinning nervously at every turn, he is a weasely bureaucrat who lives in
constant states of joy at working for the president or dread of screwing it all
up, which he does. I particularly
enjoyed the primary conflict between the president (Jason Robards) and the CIA
Director (based on Richard Helms) played by Cliff Robertson, because that’s a
story not addressed in any other movies that I’m aware of; (although Oliver
Stone’s 1995 film Nixon has a great
10-minute battle-of-wits sequence between Nixon and Helms that’s worth the
price of admission alone). Speaking as a
minor Watergate buff, though, the source of the tension between the two is
something that I don’t think is true; that Helms was primarily concerned with
keeping Nixon from reading a secret report on assassinations commissioned by
previous presidents. In real life, Nixon
seems to have been fully aware of what was in the CIA’s files and wanted it in
order to destroy it and cover up of his own involvement (when he was Vice
President) in pushing the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. Whether Ehrlichman believed that or not is
another issue, I suppose. In any case,
the film based on his book works even if one doesn’t know much about
Watergate. It may seem a little light in
an era when movies and TV regularly portray elected officials as liars and
murderers, but what makes up for any lack of bite is the milieu of the 70s
portrayed; the world in the film still looks the way it did when the events in
question really happened; that counts for a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment