The Conversation

I put this on at home on a Saturday afternoon with the windows open, which turned out to be a mistake, because for the rest of the day I could hear my own street.

Harry Caul is the best surveillance man on the West Coast, and Gene Hackman plays him as somebody who has sanded off every surface a microphone could catch. The raincoat does half the performance: translucent, gray, buttoned over a cardigan in weather that plainly does not require it. He wears it indoors. He wears it to a party thrown in his own workshop. It’s a plastic sleeve for a man who thinks of himself as evidence.

The film hands him thirty seconds of audio recorded in Union Square at lunch, and then it just plays them again. And again. A couple circles the square, a band honks through a carol, a mime works the crowd, and buried in the hiss is one clause about what a person might do if given the chance. Harry filters it, cleans it, shifts the emphasis half by accident, and the sentence turns over like a coin. Nothing is added. The words never change. What changes is where he leans.

Nothing is added. The words never change. What changes is where he leans.

I’d never seen it, and I assumed from the reputation that it would be cold. It isn’t. It’s embarrassed. Coppola keeps catching Harry in postures no professional would want on record — playing saxophone along to a jazz record in an empty apartment, lying about his own birthday, going to confession to cop to a couple of minor sins so he doesn’t have to raise the large one. Hackman’s face in that booth is the thing I keep returning to. He apologizes at a volume nobody but a priest could pick up, which is the one moment in the movie where he’s the one being listened to.

The sound work is the star and it is not subtle about it. The whole picture is built out of tape wobble, wind, room tone, a phrase surfacing out of noise the way a word does when you finally catch it across a loud bar. The camera behaves like equipment too. It opens on a slow zoom down into the square that doesn’t feel operated by a person so much as left running, and later it pans off on its own, following someone across a room and drifting back, until the room itself feels bugged.

The party sequence is where it shows its teeth. Harry’s rivals get him drinking, flatter him, and then run a small cruel trick on him with a recorder, and Hackman lets the pride drain out of his face in real time — a man who built a life on knowing things, told in front of colleagues that he’s a subject like anybody else. Allen Garfield is very funny and very mean in it. Harrison Ford turns up in a good suit doing something quietly reptilian, several years before he was Harrison Ford.

The ending is famous enough that I’ll leave it alone, except to say it is the least satisfying outcome available and exactly the correct one, and I sat there a while with a saxophone playing in the wreckage.

It came out in 1974 with Watergate in the air, though the script predates all that by years, which is the kind of coincidence that makes a movie look prophetic when it was really just paying attention. Two hours after it finished I caught myself replaying a conversation I’d had that morning, hunting for where I’d put the stress. That’s the trick of the thing. It doesn’t make you paranoid about the world. It makes you paranoid about your own hearing.