Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Teri Garr,
Harrison Ford
Few things are more thrilling in cinema than being plunged into a richly
detailed yet unfamiliar world. The portrayal of that world doesn't have to
be accurate; it just needs to be convincing. Who knows how accurate
Francis Ford Coppola's depiction of the world of surveillance experts
in The Conversation really is, but it's certainly convincing.
Coppola takes what is usually thought of as a glamorous and thrilling
profession and makes it relatably mundane. He builds a world of unremarkable
middle-aged men with bad hair and worse fashion, who geek out over new tech
developments, who hail their colleagues as legends in the field while
secretly envying their positions.
Coppola has acknowledged Antonioni's Blow-up as a chief
inspiration for the downbeat thriller he made in between the first two
Godfather movies. The Conversation shares
essentially the same premise as Blow-up, but it swaps out photography for audio surveillance (as De Palma would
later do with Blow Out) and replaces David Hemmings' fast-living twentysomething shutterbug with
an introverted 44-year-old wiretapper, Gene Hackman's Harry Caul.
Coppola apes Antonioni's trademark images of human figures dwarfed by
imposing architecture here, but his film's stripped down, quotidian approach
to its subject seems just as influenced by those gritty British spy
thrillers that emerged as a reaction to James Bond in the mid-60s: films
like The Ipcress File and
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, whose protagonists were unremarkable men in raincoats who kept their
heads down and did their jobs until a point where they find their conscience
tested. Unlike the Union Jack waving 007 series, such movies questioned
whether Her Majesty was really worth serving in secret.
Thanks to Nixon and the ongoing Vietnam war, America was experiencing a
similar cynicism in the early '70s, giving rise to a slew of paranoid
thrillers, the best of which is Coppola's film.
The Conversation makes its political point (which amounts to a
warning to examine all evidence and question everything you see and hear) by
presenting us with a resolutely apolitical protagonist. Harry is the west
coast's top surveillance man, possibly the best in the whole US. He prides
himself on his work, which is all-consuming, and his professional philosophy
is to never ask questions of those who hire his services, and to never get
personally involved with a case.
Harry's professional and personal ethics come into conflict when he's hired
by a shady corporate figure known only as "The Director" (Robert Duvall) to spy on Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest),
two young people who appear to be engaged in an affair. Listening back to
his tapes of a conversation recorded between Ann and Mark, Harry becomes
fixated on a line spoken by Mark - "He'd kill us if he had the chance" -
which leads him to believe the couple are in mortal danger. Refusing to hand
over the tapes, Harry finds himself followed by The Director's shady
assistant (a supremely sinister Harrison Ford) and grows increasingly
paranoid that he may be the victim of surveillance himself.
Coppola couples Harry's professional downfall with an unravelling of his
personal life. Harry has an unlikely lover in Amy (Teri Garr), a
younger woman whose apartment he visits while never allowing her access to
his own home. Harry's refusal to open up to Amy leads her to finally give up
on him, even changing her telephone number to avoid him (it's hinted that
Harry may have bugged her previous number). At a surveillance industry
convention, Harry is goaded and manipulated by a rival, Bernie (Allen Garfield), who manages to humiliate Harry with the aid of a flirtatious woman (Elizabeth MacRae).
What makes The Conversation so gripping is how it readily
pauses its thriller plot to allow us to spend time with Harry outside of his
work. The taciturn Harry doesn't like to tell anyone anything about himself,
but the film tells us plenty on his behalf. Coppola surrounds Harry with
banal settings that externalise his emotional emptiness, giving the usually
glamorous San Francisco the appearance of some bland rust belt city, all
empty warehouses, overgrown railroad tracks and sparsely decorated office
blocks. For Coppola, who has always leaned into the image of the Italian
patriarch who loves to surround himself with family and friends, making a
movie about the insular Irish Harry must have been akin to studying an alien
species.
The extroverted Hackman famously struggled to get into the character of
Harry, but his discomfort in Harry's skin only adds an extra layer to the
character, creating the impression that deep down Harry wants to be more
open but relies on keeping himself closed off for the sake of his
profession. We're given a hint of this internal conflict in how Harry plays
a saxophone along to Jazz records, ironic that a man so given to order
should indulge in that most improvisational music form. David Shire's
wonderful score - which sounds like a ghost playing a piano in an abandoned
music hall - floats around Harry like the Bay Area fog.
When Coppola returns to his film's thriller elements it's all the more
powerful for how well developed his protagonist is. Unlike most conspiracy
thrillers the threat here isn't so much to Harry's life but rather to his
pride and his professionalism. The idea that Harry might be spied upon
doesn't bother him for what a potential listener might uncover, because his
life is so empty there's nothing to find. It's the notion that someone might
have turned his own weapons against him, that someone might outsmart him
with his own tricks, that gets under Harry's skin, leading to the film's
famously maniacal denouement. In an age when we happily give up our privacy
in order to play Tetris on our phones, Harry's paranoia now almost seems
quaint. What would he make of today's world, where even a fridge can be
hacked to spy on its owner? Ironically, the Harry Cauls of the world have
won while simultaneously realising their greatest fear. They're listening
right now.
