Absence of Malice Blu-ray Review
Don't Blame Cable, Bloggers or Fox News; It Started Long Ago
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, October 29, 2011
Few mainstream directors in the last half of the 20th Century were as productive as the late Sydney Pollack, but two periods in his
career stand out: the early Seventies, when he made
The Way We Were and
Three Days of the
Condor; and the early Eighties, when he made
Tootsie, the multiple Oscar-winning
Out of Africa
and
Absence of Malice. The last merits renewed attention, not only because it contains a classic
Paul Newman performance, but because it's an essential counterpoint to the much lauded (justifiably so)
All the President's Men.
What a difference five years can make. In that short time, the crusading journalists and
courageous sources of Alan J. Pakula's film had become amoral careerists personified by Sally
Field's reporter and Bob Balaban's cynical prosecutor. Instead of exposing government's abuse
of power, the press became a tool of it, all for the sake of a story. "You don't write the truth",
says Newman, playing an anguished private citizen who wakes up one day to find himself
indicted in the court of public opinion by a front page story based on anonymous sources. "You
write what people
say." To our ears, that sounds like standard operating procedure, because it's
what passes for journalism now: repeating what people say, no matter how ludicrous or
unsupported. (As one wag noted, if an advocacy group issued a statement insisting the earth was
flat, the headline would read: "Debate Rages Over Shape of Earth".) After leaked information
helped bring down a president, everyone started doing it routinely, because everyone wanted to
control the story. It's only a short step from there to
manufacturing stories, which is what the
prosecutor does in
Absence of Malice.
The title refers to a legal standard. "Malice", in the law of libel, means
actual knowledge that a
story is false. Normally, a newspaper or other media source commits libel by publishing a false
statement damaging to a person's reputation where it was only
negligent in failing to ascertain
the truth. But under the Supreme Court's landmark decision in
New York Times v. Sullivan,
negligence no longer applies when the person in question is a so-called "public figure" (a concept
that, as the newspaper's lawyer says in the film, is impossible to pin down). A public figure must
prove that the newspaper knew the story was false and published it anyway. It's a standard that's
almost impossible to satisfy, and that's the whole point, because the First Amendment is
supposed to foster open and robust public discussion, even if it wrecks the lives of a few
unfortunates who find themselves promoted to "public figures" by officials with a hidden agenda.
Pollack always like to establish a film's milieu as realistically as possible, and the title sequence
of
Absence of Malice is a lively mini-documentary on how newspapers were printed in the
analogue era. Then we're plunged into the criminal investigation that drives the narrative. A
prominent Miami labor official, Joey Diaz, is missing and presumed dead. The local mob, headed
by Santos Malderone (Luther Adler), is the chief suspect, having fought for years to keep unions
out of Miami. A federal strike force headed by a Justice Department weasel named Elliot Rosen
(Bob Balaban) has been organized to crack the case. Rosen is supposed to coordinate with the
local U.S. Attorney, James Quinn (Don Hood), but Rosen likes to do things his way. (Today
we'd say he "goes rogue".)
Trivia note: Quinn is consistently referred to as a "D.A.", which is a state prosecutor, not federal.
Since screenwriter Kurt Luedtke, a former journalist, got all the other legal terminology right,
this appears to be deliberate. Maybe Luedtke and Pollack didn't think the audience would
understand that a "U.S. Attorney" is a prosecutor. Rudy Guiliani wasn't yet a household name.
Stymied in his investigation, Rosen decides to squeeze the nephew of Santos Malderone,
Michael Colin Gallagher (Newman), even though Gallagher is widely known to be a straight
arrow, having taken over his late father's wholesale liquor business, but not his smuggling
operation. An ambitious reporter for the
Miami Herald, Megan Carter (Field), is always buzzing
around the strike force, exchanging pleasantries with one of the FBI agents, Waddell (Barry
Primus), whom she used to date. (Whether for business or pleasure is never entirely clear.) Rosen
lets Megan into his office for an "interview" in which he says nothing, but he arranges to be
called out of the office, leaving Megan there with Gallagher's file conspicuously sitting on his
desk. She reads the file and submits a front-page story, vetted by her editor, "Mac" (Josef
Sommer), reporting that Gallagher is a key suspect in the Diaz investigation. Mission
accomplished, pressure applied.
Gallagher's life begins to fall apart. His employees will no longer report for work, because their
union believes he's connected to the murder of a labor hero. Truckers stop delivering. Long-time
customers cancel accounts. Uncle Santos has men following him to see whether he'll make a
deal. And when Gallagher goes to confront Megan and Mac, they won't tell him anything about
their sources. (It's standard journalistic practice.)
It gets worse. Gallagher has an air-tight alibi for the Diaz case, but it's one he can't disclose
without gravely injuring someone else. He was out of town when Diaz disappeared, helping a
childhood friend, Teresa Perron, deal with difficult personal issues. Teresa is a sweet but
troubled woman who works at a Catholic school and still lives with her father. She's played by
Melinda Dillon, who most will recognize as the mother determined to find her missing child in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Not realizing that the accusations against her friend Michael
aren't the real issue, Teresa seeks out Megan Carter in an attempt to clear her friend and finds
intimate details of her life spilled all over the front page. The scene in which she waits by the
front door to intercept the paper before her father can see it is heart-breaking. (Dillon was
nominated for an Oscar for her performance.)
Gallagher eventually learns that Rosen was behind the leak and goes about setting him up by his
own devices: leaks, false trails, planted news stories. Eventually everyone finds themselves
hauled into a room in the federal building to be grilled by an exasperated Assistant Attorney
General named Wells, who's been dispatched from Washington to find out "what in
Christ is
going on around here". Wells is played by Wilford Brimley in what was then his most significant
role to date, and director Pollack tells the story of how Brimley was cast with obvious relish in
the accompanying documentary. If there's a bit of preachiness in Wells's pronouncements (and
there almost has to be at this point in the story), Brimley has the down-home authenticity to bring
it off. He's the ideal counterweight to Newman's Gallagher, who says very little in the extended
scene -- it plays like an informal trial -- but speaks volumes with the way he reacts to everything
that's said. "We'd had a leak", U.S. Attorney Quinn tries to explain to Wells, and Gallagher
smiles with delight as Wells interrupts him:
You had a "leak"? You call what's goin' on around here
a "leak"? Boy, the last time there was a leak like this, Noah
built hisself a boat.
Parts of
Absence of Malice may seem contrived. In particular, the romance between Megan
Carter and Gallagher has been called far-fetched (and certainly unprofessional on Megan's part).
But is it really a romance? We know from the outset that Megan dates sources, and we see her
string along Waddell, the FBI agent. There's barely an encounter between Megan and Gallagher
where we don't see some clash of agendas, as one or the other (or both) looks for information or
insight into the larger game being played. Sure, there's an attraction between them, but it's
always accompanied by some element of "business". (Pollack notes in the documentary that he
wanted Field for the part, because he needed her likeability to offset all the terrible things Megan
does as a reporter, which is what she remains first and foremost.) And while it may be
inappropriate for sources and reporters (or doctors and patients or lawyers and clients) to become
romantically involved, anyone who thinks it doesn't happen is living in fantasyland.
Absence of Malice was the last film in which Newman played anything resembling a traditional
romantic lead, and he could still bring it off effortlessly at age 55 (and playing a good ten years
younger). The following year, with
The Verdict, Newman moved into an entirely new and rich
phase of his career, playing older men with a clear sense of who they are and where they've been,
using his incomparable gift for expressing a character's thoughts without words to convey a
sense of the weight of years of accumulated experience. If for no other reason,
Absence of Malice
is worth seeing to savor Newman's last go-around at the kind of passionate younger role
that made him famous. I challenge anyone to watch the scene where Gallagher explodes and
attacks Megan and not feel disturbed by the violence.
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