The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)

Down the rabbit hole

(Warning: plot twists discussed in explicit detail)

Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, inspired by the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy is perhaps not the best film on the subject-- arguably near the top is Fred Zinneman's Day of the Jackal, a lean hide-n-seek thriller about a coldblooded Englishman (but are there any other kind?) plotting to shoot President Charles de Gaulle; on the apex sits John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, about an American vice-presidential candidate doubling as Russian agent (Hilarious idea! Now where have we seen that before?) plotting to assume top spot by having his running mate killed (?!). 

Arguably this film isn't even Pakula's best-- I'd nominate All the President's Men for the honor, the director's crackerjack smart adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein's bestselling account of the Watergate Hotel burglary, and the consequent investigation that helped pull down the Nixon Administration. 

That said, and despite the inherently silly premise (all-powerful secret organization grooming political assassins), the bizarre bits peppering the narrative, I call this Pakula's most emblematic film, and lemme explain why--

Not sure I can even consider Pakula adept at action-- I remember the climax in Klute being messy (the chemistry between Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland more than making up for the fault); I remember watching Warren Beatty's journalist Joe Frady fishhook his adversary Sheriff Wicker (Kelly Thordsen) at the foot of the Salmontail Dam, the editing so abrupt you wonder if maybe footage was lost, forcing Pakula to patchwork what's left. What follows-- Frady and Wicker grappling in flood against towering natural landscape-- is hardly the stuff of boxoffice hits, yet the image gets to you. Huge dam, raging water, tiny figures struggling to stay afloat-- the narrative seems to lose urgency or meaning, the two figures like ants in a rising tide. No matter what they do-- against the flood or against each other-- they're doomed. 

Time and time again Pakula does this; it's as if he shot the entire picture underwater, the characters wrestling in slow motion, and you experience this feeling both claustrophobic (enormous pressures bearing down on your head) and agoraphobic-- (you shrink, terrified of all the wide-open spaces). More than thrills Pakula has a gift for inspiring dread, all the more unsettling because you can't quite pinpoint where it's coming from and what form it'll ultimately take. 

Sometimes it isn't even a visual tactic; witness the sequence on the plane-- when you learn there's a bomb on board your first and most natural impulse would be to yell at the nearest stewardess. Frady I suppose is shy-- he'd rather scribble a warning on the toilet mirror, but when someone starts to walk in he panics; he has second thoughts. He can yell 'bomb'-- but would they believe him? What if (and I have to admit this would take a lot of patience and nerve to pull off) he wrote the news on a note, to be accidentally found by the stewardess? O she won't believe it-- on the other hand can she afford not to? It's the anonymity that's unsettling, the bizarre randomness; what if someone else found the note? What if the note was never found? She might begin to wonder if maybe she should act (How long is that fuse anyway?), for starters by informing the flight captain. Which when you think about it is Frady taking his cue from how Pakula works: bides his time, opts for less obvious route, aims for the more challenging-- more artistic-- task of shifting our complacent selves off-balance. 

Pakula's style is such you even wonder at the title: 'parallax' is the difference in orientation an object can take when viewed from differing points in space; your right eye views a tree from one angle, your left eye from a different angle; your brain resolves the two images resulting in a three-dimensional image of the tree. 'Parallax' in the film (based on a book by Loren Singer) suggests a view of the world from a different perspective, say that of a hired killer, or a company that trains such killers, or a news reporter investigating said company. Gain enough parallax-- view the world from a different enough perspective-- and you may never be the same. Pakula does more I suspect than just adopt the novel (which I haven't read but hear is short on details), he eases you into this way of looking by adopting said view with his camera: you end up impotent, knowing enough to be afraid yet not enough to do anything-- at most you can abort a flight and save some passengers. 

The finale at the convention center: what's so horrifying isn't the plot finally revealed, or Frady's (Can the makers come up with a more appropriate name in all of paranoid cinema?) ultimate fate, or the conspirators' success (the dull drone of the final investigating committee's concluding statement rhyming with the dull drone of the initial investigating committee's concluding statement); what horrifies you is the useless spiral of the golf cart as it carries its slumped candidate forward, tipping chairs left and right till it runs aground. What horrifies you is the futility of it all, like Harry Moseby's boat driving itself in yet another spiral, bearing its forlorn knight on his pointless quest against forces too vast for us to even understand, much less vanquish, much less control. 

Against the pantheon of 70s American filmmakers maybe Pakula wasn't the very best-- he doesn't have the lyricism of Peckinpah, the velocity of Scorsese, the sweep of Coppola, the grandeur of Kubrick, the off-kilter of Altman-- but I submit that when he's cooking (at a near-invisible maddeningly low simmer) he induces a sense of helplessness few if any can, and for this at least we should be grateful.