Alan J. Pakula is quite a revered figure here at Irreviews. Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976) are landmarks in the art of the psycho-political thriller, and hopefully I will soon get a chance to review them here on Irreviews to properly extol them. But these films are two-thirds of Pakula’s so-called “paranoia trilogy,” the third being The Parallax View (1974). After recently viewing The Parallax View I am sad to report that it is quite a disappointment.

The problem with The Parallax View is that the story and screenplay are just not very good. Pakula is definitely doing his “Pakula thing” as a director. It should be noted that the scene where Warren Beatty takes the “video test” in the Parallax corporation is rather remarkable – no director today would have the balls to keep that scene going on for that long; in the end we actually feel that we have taken the test. Really great film making. But for the most part Pakula’s talent in simply wasted serving a mediocre script and storyline with weakly drawn characters.

Even the concept of the film is weak. It is inspired by the Kennedy assassination in that a Senator gets bumped off during a campaign event in the Seattle space needle and then witnesses start disappearing over the next few years – lots of witnesses. The first problem is that what makes the Kennedy assassination interesting is the evidence; it is interesting because if you take the time to sort through, digest, and ponder the complicated web of facts in the case it is seen clearly to be a conspiracy, yet the Warren Commission was trumpeting the opposite conclusion. Then, and only then, does it become interesting that witnesses also happen to be disappearing.

But in The Parallax View no time is spent looking at any evidence or anything about the assassination itself. They show the fact that there were two gunmen, and then cut to a committee proclaiming (in an overly sinister way) that there was only one shooter. Then it just dives into the idea that witnesses started dying at an alarming rate. Warren Beatty gets pulled in because a friend who was at the assassination tells him that she is afraid for her life (and why) and then she dies. It’s not a bad step up, I suppose, it’s just not that inspired or interesting. It’s kind of one-dimensional, and this one-dimensionality plagues the movie all the way through. True, in the scene on the boat the guy shows him a couple of photos taken at the assassination, but they are completely uninteresting, as is his commentary, and both are totally designed to re-enforce (I guess that’s the right word) the fact that there was a second assassin, which we already know from watching the opening scene.

Warren Beatty is actually pretty good in his role. But again, the writing is a problem. When he infiltrates the Parallax Corporation, he fools them by getting a hold of some entrance exam and asking a psychologist friend to deconstruct it from the premise that it is designed to identify social deviants that would make good assassins. That’s a really good idea, and could have set up a fabulous scene. But then instead of taking the time to write a scene showing him deconstructing the test, they have the psychologist just happen to have a psychopathic killer kind of hanging around his lab (or maybe he works there, it’s hard to tell,) and suggest that they give him the test and just see what he answers – pretty lame writing, if you ask me.

But when Beatty gets in and takes the second test, it seems clear to me that he passes because he is a social deviant. Now, this was hinted at in some boring and badly-written pieces of dialog between Beatty and his boss Hugh Cronyn. But it needed to be woven into the overall tapestry of the film, rather than just getting airbrushed over the top of certain parts. Beatty’s character should have been a lot deeper. Think of the scene where he first meets the rep from Parallax – he should be convincing in that scene because he probably is a pretty good candidate for their assassin-mill; this kind of nuance is simply lost on the writers.

The action/suspense sequences are in general a little disappointing. The scene at the dam is not too bad – it has its merits; the sailboat and airplane scenes are just okay, not great. Well, okay, maybe the airplane scene is pretty good, in certain ways; I’ll go that far!

I found the drawn-out last quarter of the film and all that shit with the band a bit boring. And as for the “clever” ending that is supposed to give you chills when you realize what actually went down, well it wasn’t awful, but I just don’t think that they set the whole thing up well enough to have it be really convincing and chilling.

The Parallax View is not a bad film, but it is no where near the other two films in Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy,” and is definitely not a timeless movie you would return to over and over. But I don’t mean to be overly harsh about it. By the standards of most of today’s dreck it’s … well, a bit better, at least. And after all, how many films written like Klute can a director expect to stumble into in his career?