The Conversation (1974)

WHAT A CURIOUS THING that this sparse, meditative novel should fit between the two gilt gospels on the bookshelf of Coppola’s career. ‘The Godfather’, 1972; ‘The Conversation’, 1974; ‘The Godfather: Pt II’, 1974. To the right lies madness—‘Apocalypse Now’, 1979—and then a murky abyss. To the left, his film adolescence and obscurity. In this midst ‘The Conversation’ is an unlikely orphan reportedly half-abandoned by its director (already consumed with the Godfather sequel) to a rookie editor, Richard Chew. (Lucky thing, that, given the career Chew would go on to have.) Alongside star-studded gangster dynasty and wholesale Armageddon, ‘The Conversation’s restraint and delicacy are wholly unexpected. But a closer look reveals the thread running throughout Coppola’s 70s portfolio that, once grasped, untangles everything.

Aside from these four pictures, in the 70s Coppola also wrote screenplays for such films as ‘Patton’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’, two settings and cultures that could hardly be more different. But shared between them, as with all Coppola’s work at this time, was the exploration of the conflicted loner. Sometimes this loner was mysterious—Gatsby, Harry Caul in ‘The Conversation’, Brando’s Kurtz in ‘Apocalypse Now’—and sometimes headstrong or iconoclastic—Patton, the Corleone dons, and once again Kurtz—but always was he in solitude. ‘The Conversation’, being the most intimate and unadorned of any of the aforementioned works, provides the clearest case study on this archetype and reveals Coppola’s deep, but never idealized, respect for it.

Harry Caul is the consummate professional, a celebrity in a field of the faceless, defined by his work and little else but for his saxophone and his Catholicism. He is solemn about his religion and somehow tenderly dispassionate with everything else. Perhaps it is Hackman’s great physicality bleeding out around Caul’s thrice-measured edges, but we sense that this is a man as much Lenny as he is George. Sometimes cold and calculating, but also sometimes naïve and never malicious. Modest to a fault, and doubtful. Halfway through the film he dreams of confronting a woman he’s spied upon, and the admissions of childhood infirmity spill out of him senselessly. Yet she is restless, far removed, and does not respond. Caul has always had this weakness buried inside him and it takes the whole of ‘The Conversation’ to tease it out. After years of ignoring his clients’ discussions, prizing audio fidelity over collegiate fraternity, he is suddenly caught off-guard by one chilling admission amidst waves of ambiguity: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”

Suddenly, the great skills that empowered him have become shackles, and once-confident strides are reduced to tentative shuffles. The remainder of the film is a masterful tête–à– tête between his confliction and conviction. When does professional detachment give way to human empathy? Will the guilt long suppressed over a case that turned deadly come back to compromise his career? Is it a career he even desires to have? Would it perhaps not be better for him to leave it all behind and choose to stay with Amy, the woman whose rent he pays but whose bed he does not share? Each of these is enough fodder for toothsome drama, but none is ever exploited too aggressively. We are left like Amy, posing simple questions to Harry as he putters about in the background shadows, never receiving straight answers.

For as close as we get to Caul—the film makes no attempt to seriously substantiate any other character—we do not particularly identify with him. We know him as well as anybody can, but we are still watchers. Voyeurs. The film reinforces this attitude whenever possible, beginning with an opening sequence that could not have set more perfect a tone. A camera slowly, slowly tracks in overhead a busy city park and eventually centers on a street mime, himself a pretender, and only reveals Hackman’s character by ‘happenstance’ once the mime sidles up alongside him. We hear David Shire’s ethereal piano theme—part a mournful take on ‘The Sting’s use of ‘The Entertainer’, part Bill Evans modal lyricism—intercut with scrambled surveillance tape and scratchy snips of dialogue.

The camera embodies the passivity of surveillance, too, with its slow pans and regular refusal to follow characters from one room to the next, leaving audiences to search for clues amidst their décor or squint at moving shadows on the wall. During a lengthy party scene in his sprawling office floor (seemingly rented in an unfurnished industrial high-rise), Harry is put to the question by a hungry competitor. Affecting indifference, he strides through the kitchen to attend to some small business and ends up on the far side of a counter behind a translucent pane. He faces the camera but is a blurry silhouette; his questioner is on the camera side, but faces away from us. Then lens sits, waiting for him to reemerge, and never offers a reverse shot. Throughout the film, Harry wears an equally translucent raincoat some ten years out of fashion. He is a scientist ill at ease outside his laboratory, and increasingly unsettled even within it.

The film’s climax and denouement reveals its roots in the horror genre, but despite shades of ‘Psycho’, bloody secrets revealed, and semi-psychotic breaks, ‘The Conversation’ never shakes its muted, morose atmosphere. Some directors—even Coppola himself in a different mood—would have felt a more energetic or conclusive climax was necessary to send the audience off happy, but any such break would have betrayed the perfectly-held confidence of the past 100 minutes. The undulating plot (egged on by a faintly malicious, tastefully underplayed Harrison Ford) and Caul’s own fate are masterfully rendered, but ultimately less critical to ‘The Conversation’s success than its commitment to tone. Like Caul fiddling with dials, we are left with an incomplete, imperfect tape, but one whose most critical bits have all been pieced together from the cutting room floor and spliced without error.