Returning to The Conversation 48 years later
The Conversation is the movie that made cinephiles take Francis Ford Coppola seriously.
His previous one had been an international hit, a dubious achievement in the eyes of sophisticated critics in those days.
The Conversation generated a fraction of The Godfather’s box-office receipts, but it got the Palme d’Or in 1974.
Smart opinion — not least the opinion of my 15-year-old self — now regarded Coppola as the equal of such New Hollywood geniuses as Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorcese, Jerry Schatzberg, Hal Ashby and pre-Jaws Steven Spielberg.
At the weekend I sat down to revisit the film. What did my 63-year-old self make of it?
For the sake of clarity, I’ll unpick the storyline and reassemble the elements in a logical sequence:
- The wife of a San Francisco CEO and her lover undertake to lure the husband into a hotel room to kill him
- They are helped in this endeavour by the CEO’s right-hand-man (young Harrison Ford) who hires a wire-tapping genius (Gene Hackman) for a bogus spying job
- Hackman records a conversation in which the two lovers pretend to arrange a secret rendezvous at the said hotel
- Hackman doesn’t know it’s a trap but suspects something sinister is afoot; he refuses to hand over the tape to Ford
- Ford gets a prostitute to steal the recording and passes it on to the CEO, who falls for it, goes to the hotel to confront the lovers and gets slaughtered
- Hearing about the murder on the news, Hackman realises he’s been used and sinks further into paranoid depression
- The wife takes over the company; one presumes she and her lover live happily ever after.
This story raises a number of questions.
If you’re trying to bump off your husband or boss, tricking a private investigator into acting as an accessory doesn’t look like a good idea. What if the guy fails to record the full conversation (the difficulty of the exercise in the middle of Union Square at lunchtime is a premise of the film)?
And if everything works as planned, how is the private dick supposed to react to the killing? What’s stopping him from going to the police with an editing-roomful of incriminating evidence?
My summary, you might object, doesn’t begin to capture the essence of The Conversation. It ignores:
- The through-a-glass-darkly narrative centring on a flawed observer who fumbles towards the truth
- The subtle repetition of snatches of recorded discussion that are re-interpreted as the words become clearer
- The claustrophobic photography and use of urban locations reminiscent of the French cinema vérité masters Coppola admired
- Hackman’s impressive performance as a lost soul scarred by past missions that have gone wrong
- The skilful way the viewer is wrong-footed and led to regard the couple as victims until the dénouement
- The chord the film struck at the height of the Watergate scandal, and the enduring relevance of the surveillance theme in the post-Snowden era.
Above all, factual verisimilitude can’t be a touchstone of dramatic quality. No one condemns A Winter’s Tale on the grounds that jilted wives don’t win their husbands back by returning as statues decades later.
I don’t deny any of that. And I commend my 15-year-old self for recognising The Conversation as the masterpiece is is.
All I’m saying, with the hindsight of half a century, is that to appreciate it you have to ignore a plot that makes no sense.
