The Conversation
I used to think this was one of the few perfect movies ever made. I still adore it, but the seams are starting to show. It remains, however, a formally ambitious and audacious thriller and a showcase for a brilliant and heartbreaking performance by Gene Hackman. “The Conversation” — released in 1974, in between “The Godfather” and its sequel — is the work of a liberated Francis Ford Coppola, enjoying rare freedom as solo writer, producer and director, and it shows his immense talent in full bloom.
Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who starts to question the morality of his work when he’s assigned to record an elliptical chat between a seemingly terrified young woman and a male companion. Coppola visualizes the recording process with telephoto lenses that zero in on the couple just like the high-powered directional microphones that Harry uses. And in a great cinematic coup, he returns again and again to images of the couple as Harry works to piece together every word of their chat. We hear the tape and see the couple over and over, and a seemingly rambling, meaningless conversation takes on ominous overtones.
Parsing out information about Harry carefully, Coppola eventually reveals that a family was killed as a result of a recording Harry made a few years earlier. While he professes not to care what a tape is used for after he completes it, he cares deeply. A practicing Catholic, Harry is riddled with guilt and terrified by the prospect that the information he uncovers may be used to hurt someone. “I’m not afraid of death,” he confesses in a dream sequence. “I am afraid of murder.” Harry is wary and withdrawn. He wears a cheap plastic raincoat all the time, like a shield. He doesn’t keep anything of value, sentimental or otherwise, in his apartment, save for a saxophone that he plays on top of jazz recordings. He has a girlfriend (Teri Garr) who waits for him in her tiny apartment, never sure if he’s going to come and visit. When he does show up, he reveals nothing about himself. The lone scene between them is sublime. Hackman plays beautifully off a talented supporting cast, always choosing his words carefully. He makes Harry’s reclusiveness attractive and noble — and sad. When he does let his guard down, we are immediately moved, and we are crushed along with him when he learns the one person he allowed to get close has betrayed him.
SPOILERS. When the murder Harry fears comes to fruition, the movie stops making sense, at least logistically. In their conversation, the couple sets up a time to meet in a specific hotel room, and the corporate executive (Robert Duvall) who paid Harry to bug them listens to the tape. The executive then goes to the hotel room at the appointed time, and they kill him there. Huh? If he thinks they’re plotting to kill him, why does he show up? Or do they not kill him in the hotel at all? Is that just Harry’s imagination? When Harry goes into the hotel room, he finds no evidence of a murder until he flushes the toilet, which overflows with blood. This is clearly in his mind. Yet Coppola strings together a series of images toward the end that seem to indicate objectively that yes, the Duvall character was killed in the hotel room exactly as Harry envisioned it. Then Harry goes home and gets a call from Duvall’s assistant, played by Harrison Ford, who says, “We know you know. We’ll be watching you,” then plays a tape into the phone indicating Harry’s apartment has been bugged. They know he knows what? I don’t even think he knows what he knows. I really prefer the reading that the murder is all in Harry’s mind, but neither that nor a literal reading quite holds together.
Nevertheless, the movie always makes sense emotionally, straight through to the astonishing final sequence in which Harry tears apart his apartment looking for the bug, only to give up and start wailing away on his sax as Coppola’s camera pans back and forth, surveillance-style. Is the bug in the saxophone? Possibly, but Harry doesn’t want to know. At least for the moment, he has cleansed himself of paranoia.
Even when it’s not entirely lucid, “The Conversation” is coldly gripping. The simple piano score by David Shire sets a quiet, contemplative mood. Coppola works on a small scale, yet his ambition remains huge. He prods himself and his collaborators to greatness.