My hunch is that the buzz surrounding this film is largely due to the fact that it OUGHT to be good. The idea is a good one. It's been made into a film, so far as I can tell, exactly once: no other film in history that I'm aware of is a remake, a foreshadowing, a knock-off, a parody or a faithful homage. There's really nothing better (or worse) to compare it to. Coppola made the film, between "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Part II", two films which are widely, if incorrectly, regarded as among the best of all time, with a talented crew and without any obvious mistakes. However few (or many) positive virtues it may have it has few positive failings. On balance it's probably okay, and certainly worth watching once.
Spoilers follow...
But surely even the film's champions can see how painfully boring most of it is. It's depressing, all right, because it's always depressing to spend two hours in the company of someone or something with no energy, no life and not very many thoughts; and I'm not referring to Harry Caul here (although I could be), but to the film itself. Coppoloa is as obsessive about getting down every little uninteresting detail about people and events he doesn't understand the significance of, as his protagonist is; if the process of watching the minutae of bugging is SOMETIMES involving (as in the opening scene, where we see how the title conversation was recorded in the first place; or the sequence in which Caul patiently and methodically sifts through what sound like random crackles in order to pull out complete, comprehensible sentences; or even the trade show, where matters of moment look as though they might be under discussion), this is because it's sometimes going somewhere. But Coppola doesn't know how to build. When the key sentence "He'd kill us if he got the chance" leaps out of the soundtrack at us, it's an arresting moment, but only because we suspect that the sentence means something. Only gradually does it dawn on us that we're never going to be told what it means; nor will we be given any further evidence, not even the thinnest little sliver, that might help us work it out. Nor does this sentence move the story forward in any way. Harry gets more paranoid as a result of hearing the sentence but while he moves around more frantically he doesn't seem to be going in any particular direction.
Another writer calls Coppola's film "a great paranoid character study disguised as a thriller", and goes on to say that it works well on either level. This view could not be more wrong. If "The Conversation" worked well as a thriller, we wouldn't need to invoke the central character's madness, and the fact that any particular thing we see may not really be happening at all, simply to make sense of the story; and if it worked as a paranoid character study, we wouldn't need to think that some of Harry's delusions may not be delusions at all in order to be interested in them. This leaves open the possibility that the film works as a COMBINATION of paranoid character study and thriller; but for that to be the case it would have to be less tedious.
The "ambiguous" ending is a simple cop-out, which is why the final shot of Harry's smashed-to-bits rooms, which OUGHT to be shocking and creepy, carry almost no charge whatever. Ambiguous endings only work when there is at least one satisfying disambiguation in there somewhere. There's none to be had here. This is the best I can come up with: Harry has been had by is colleagues again, just as he was at the trade show. The device he thought was fake, the one which would purportedly a distant wiretapper to turn any telephone receiver anywhere in the world into a live microphone, in fact WORKED, and Harry destroyed everything in his flat looking for newly-planted bug when the only bug present was the one that had been there all along.
The murder, or would-be-murder, or imagined murder (whichever it was), is, on this theory, little more than a red herring. I don't like this, but don't blame me if the film doesn't know what it's about.
Spoilers follow...
But surely even the film's champions can see how painfully boring most of it is. It's depressing, all right, because it's always depressing to spend two hours in the company of someone or something with no energy, no life and not very many thoughts; and I'm not referring to Harry Caul here (although I could be), but to the film itself. Coppoloa is as obsessive about getting down every little uninteresting detail about people and events he doesn't understand the significance of, as his protagonist is; if the process of watching the minutae of bugging is SOMETIMES involving (as in the opening scene, where we see how the title conversation was recorded in the first place; or the sequence in which Caul patiently and methodically sifts through what sound like random crackles in order to pull out complete, comprehensible sentences; or even the trade show, where matters of moment look as though they might be under discussion), this is because it's sometimes going somewhere. But Coppola doesn't know how to build. When the key sentence "He'd kill us if he got the chance" leaps out of the soundtrack at us, it's an arresting moment, but only because we suspect that the sentence means something. Only gradually does it dawn on us that we're never going to be told what it means; nor will we be given any further evidence, not even the thinnest little sliver, that might help us work it out. Nor does this sentence move the story forward in any way. Harry gets more paranoid as a result of hearing the sentence but while he moves around more frantically he doesn't seem to be going in any particular direction.
Another writer calls Coppola's film "a great paranoid character study disguised as a thriller", and goes on to say that it works well on either level. This view could not be more wrong. If "The Conversation" worked well as a thriller, we wouldn't need to invoke the central character's madness, and the fact that any particular thing we see may not really be happening at all, simply to make sense of the story; and if it worked as a paranoid character study, we wouldn't need to think that some of Harry's delusions may not be delusions at all in order to be interested in them. This leaves open the possibility that the film works as a COMBINATION of paranoid character study and thriller; but for that to be the case it would have to be less tedious.
The "ambiguous" ending is a simple cop-out, which is why the final shot of Harry's smashed-to-bits rooms, which OUGHT to be shocking and creepy, carry almost no charge whatever. Ambiguous endings only work when there is at least one satisfying disambiguation in there somewhere. There's none to be had here. This is the best I can come up with: Harry has been had by is colleagues again, just as he was at the trade show. The device he thought was fake, the one which would purportedly a distant wiretapper to turn any telephone receiver anywhere in the world into a live microphone, in fact WORKED, and Harry destroyed everything in his flat looking for newly-planted bug when the only bug present was the one that had been there all along.
The murder, or would-be-murder, or imagined murder (whichever it was), is, on this theory, little more than a red herring. I don't like this, but don't blame me if the film doesn't know what it's about.