• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Mar 22, 2021 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

Alan J. Pakula is remembered for capturing the gritty societal chaos of the early 1970s perhaps better than any other American director. His “Paranoia Trilogy” of Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976) explored the rapidly shifting social mores and institutional mistrust that defined this era of American history. His approach and subject matter seems tailor made for our current era, but The Parallax View - now available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection - may leave viewers wanting something more substantial. The elements of a political thriller are all present; the only thing missing is a point of view.

The Parallax View begins with a scene that would have been all too familiar to audiences in 1974. Reporters Joe Frady and Lee Carter witness the assassination of presidential candidate Charles Carroll at a fundraising event at the Space Needle in Seattle. Pakula’s shaky camera work and the textured cinematography from Gordon Willis makes the sequence feel decades ahead of its time. In the wake of the assassination, Frady and Carter begin investigating the mysterious Parallax Corporation, which recruits and brainwashes operatives to commit political assassinations.

Warren Beatty stars as Frady, a scrappy rogue journalist who plays by his own rules; shit-talking cops, getting into bar fights and sleeping with his co-workers. While investigating seemingly coincidental deaths of people present at the Carroll assassination, he infiltrates the Parallax Corporation and discovers a vast conspiracy that threatens to…keep killing politicians? It’s never really clear.

While there’s something to be said for the bleak, borderline hopeless worldview that Pakula and co. capture in the film, The Parallax View feels distinctly empty when considered as a political film. The targets of the titular assassins have no clear political agenda that is attempting to be thwarted. The idealogical stakes of the film exist in a vacuum, in which shadowy government malfeasance is an all-powerful fact of life with no goals beyond persevering the secrecy of its existence. For a film seeking to capture the zeitgeist of the most turbulent era of 20th century America, it feels fundamentally dishonest for a political thriller to have no political point of view regarding its heroes or its villains.