It starts with a camera’s dazzling longshot from high above, a slow telephoto zoom that begins with a crowd and winds up with a person - or, rather, the back of a person’s head. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), supposed surveillance extraordinare, is on the job. And, while this opening shot is precisely the kind of thing that film students love to geek out over - the virtuosity of the shot, the timing that went into it, the sound collage that accompanies it - it’s actually not there to show off, but rather to serve a purpose: to put us squarely in the voyeur’s seat, to spy on those spying, to feel the addicting rush of zeroing in on a target. Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola could surely have opened his film in a more simplistic way, but it’s hard to imagine any other opening being even half as effective. It’s a masterstroke, in a film quietly full of them.
Though Coppola was at heart a small indie filmmaker (before the label even existed, really) he had acquired quite a different reputation by 1974, mostly by virtue of writing and directing The Godfather the most successful (at the time) motion picture in the history of cinema, a grand and sprawling three hours plus epic that swept the Academy Awards and quickly weaved its way into the very fabric of the culture. Suddenly Coppola, who started his career working on Roger Corman pictures and aspired only to one day make the kind of personal films he was busy scribbling in his free time, found himself the biggest director on the planet. He could do anything he wanted next, and he wanted to do The Conversation, a much smaller and more personal film, an intimate character study that acted as both an effective thriller and a paranoid encapsulation of the (barely) post-Watergate era.
And whereas The Godfather finds itself so concerned with families and connection, The Conversation concerns itself with the most solitary of men, a man completely unattached to the people around him, with no family to speak of, no woman in his life (unless you count the hooker he occasionally visits), and no real friends to speak of; he comes unhinged when the landlady merely knows which day his birthday is.
He is lonely, and wears that loneliness with a mixture of pride and shame, scarred by a difficult childhood and continually out of place in his own present. He spies on people, but he gets paid for it. He spies on people, but feels no responsibility whatsoever for how the information he gathers is ultimately used (it’s important, he believes, to never let the job in, to never let it get personal). He spies on people and then goes home at night to play his saxophone, alone in his apartment with his jazz records. He spies on people.
Harry tries, as much as is possible, to avoid life and all its attendent complications. Except, of course, that one can ever really do that: life, one way or another, ensnares us all, no matter how strong our resolves, our defenses. For all of Harry’s (mostly) self-imposed isolation, his carefully formulated remove from society, he is nonetheless unable to completely keep life - in the form of curiosity, in the form of responsibility, in the form of a girl he may or may not be able to save - from intruding on his technological fortress of solitude. He has built his barriers, trafficked in dispassionate observation, practiced his remove - but still life gets in.
The assignment is as simple to describe as it is difficult to orchestrate: record a conversation between a man (Frederic Forest) and a woman (Cindy Williams) as they walk through a large, crowded open space in San Francisco at lunchtime. Harry leads his crew through an extensive and elaborate bugging operation headquarted in a nearby van. The job is successful; the conversation is recorded.
And, if only Mr. Caul had handed over the tapes and kept his curiosity at bay, that would have been that. But on this day, for a complex interplay of reasons - not the least of which is an attractive woman - he becomes interested in what he has recorded. He listens and re-listens to the pair’s conversation as it weaves in and out of a rash of street noise and music - When the red red robin goes bob bob bobbin along - convincing himself, in the process, that these people are in danger.
And thus does the wrestling commence, the grappling battle that lonely Harry must do with his own conscience, the struggle between his professional beliefs and his personal responsiblities. Is what he does ‘just a job’? If, through the conversation he has recorded, significant harm comes to people - is he at all to blame? If he intervenes in the situation, tries to help these people, does that alter the moral landscape of his previous, mercenary actions? Not to mention: does he even know what the tapes, this pieced together conversation, actually means?
Coppola begins to rachet up the thriller aspects of The Conversation (both a young Harrison Ford and a young Robert Duvall soon show up on the other side), but wisely chooses to continue balancing this with a focus on Caul, a character study of a man in crisis, lost in a maze of confusion and paranoia, his life slowly unwinding before us as he immerses himself ever deeper in the conversation and its implications. It’s a decidely 70s balance - a true thriller and a true character study all at once - and you’d be hard-pressed to find an American film in the last ten years that has even attempted - let alone pulled off - such a thing. It trusts its audience, it doesn’t dumb down any aspect of itself, and, when a rather sizeable twist arrives at the end of the film - a shift in articulation, a slight accent on a different syllable - it doesn’t hit you over the head Shyamalan style, all but begging you to notice how awesome and crafty it is, but rather gives it to you, simply, and leaves you to grapple with its implications. It doesn’t need to wrap itself up neatly - life seldom does - nor does it need to do the heavy-handed work of explaining itself. That part, voyeur, is up to you.
Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION is a towering achievement a masterfully constructed portrait of one man's descent into madness. Gene Hackman d...More at Family Video
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