Cinema: Lethal Leaks

ABSENCE OF MALICE

Directed by Sidney Pollack Screenplay by Kurt Luedtke omeone with no face and no name is trying to get me. And you’re the gofer.” The angry speaker is a man named Michael Gallagher. It is his misfortune to be the son and nephew of mobsters and to look as if he might be following in the family tradition under cover of managing an import business on the Miami waterfront. It is an impression that his dress, manner and accent do nothing to correct. The gofer under verbal assault is Megan Carter, and it is her misfortune to be the sort of newspaperperson who believes in first impressions—and second and third ones, when she is led from one to the next by an overly ambitious and overly clever federal task force investigating organized crime.

But, as everyone should know by now, and too few seem to remember, very little in this world ever turns out to be precisely what it seems to be. Michael (Paul Newman) is an independent cuss, all right, but no crook. And Megan (Sally Field) is not so crazily ambitious that she would, just to take a random example, fabricate a story about a child heroin addict in hopes of tugging at a Pulitzer jury’s heartstrings. Certainly she would not stoop to selling papers by retailing gossip about an incumbent President’s bugging a President-elect’s bedroom just before Inauguration. Indeed, throughout the film, as she reports each carefully leaked piece of information about Michael, thereby helping the feds to “squeeze” him into helping their cause, she behaves with perfect moral propriety. The trouble is that the standards by which she lives are inadequate to the complex realities of the world journalists are supposed to describe without fear or favor.

All this is a way of saying that Absence of Malice is not what it seems to be either. Over many of its scenes there hangs the jaunty romantic air, half cynical, half idealistic, of an old-fashioned genre film about newspapering—lots of smart cracks, some understated soul searching, plenty of entertaining characters. It is also extremely well acted at every level (one especially wants to single out Bob Balaban as the Government’s chief aggressor and Wilford Brimley as its belated voice of conscience), and directed by Sidney Pollack with a sort of crisp but unassuming professionalism that is rarer than it ought to be. Perhaps best of all, the script, by sometime Journalist Kurt Luedtke, who was once part of a Pulitzer-winning investigative team on the Detroit Free Press, has a marvelously entertaining intricacy, briskly and believably building, half-inch by half-inch, Michael’s outrage over and Megan’s entrapment in the plot to get him. When, finally, Michael turns on his tormentors, he does so by concocting a plan that permits him and the audience a revenge that is all the sweeter because it does not involve firearms, brawling or, for that matter, even a raised voice. What it amounts to is a kind of mental and moral jujitsu in which his pursuers’ own eagerness is employed to trip them up.

This film’s intelligence as entertainment is matched (and never overwhelmed) by the intelligence of its morality. And it is the presence of this latter quality that finally distinguishes it. It is not a blanket condemnation of investigative reporting. It simply says that unspeakable people can use the conventions of unnamed sources and unattributed quotes for ulterior motives, can twist them to make the journalist who thinks he is serving the public good actually serve private (or governmental) ends that are no good. Perhaps most important of all, the picture reminds us that many public actions are motivated by innocent private needs that may only look suspicious, which people are entitled to keep to themselves, and that, in any event, journalism may be too hasty an instrument to explore them properly.

At one point, in her blithe confidence that printing all the truth about absolutely everything can do no harm, Megan (who sometimes is made to appear a tad too naive to be believed) causes an unbalanced young woman whom Michael has tried to protect to commit suicide. In that tragedy’s aftermath, he says to the reporter: “Couldn’t you just see her? Couldn’t you stop scribbling, put down your goddam ballpoint and see her?” It is a question all journalists should put to themselves frequently, and we are in this film’s debt for raising it. Absence of Malice does not invalidate All the President’s Men. But with entertainment values—and a moral sense—every bit as high as that film’s, it observes that there is an underside to journalistic gallantry. —By Richard Schickel