Klute (1971) Review
8/10
A businessman disappears from a Pennsylvania town. The only lead is an obscene letter sent to a call girl in New York, and a family friend takes leave from his job to go and find him.
Klute disturbs me. The setup promises a missing-persons thriller, and what I get is Jane Fonda building a woman out of defenses, and I’d happily lose the mystery entirely if it meant more of her. The investigation is the dullest thing in the picture, and I think the film knows it.
The 8 is for a thriller that abandons its own plot for the woman at the edge of it. The missing man is a pretext. What the film is doing is watching Bree Daniels manage a life she’s decided to hold at a distance, while a man with a recording of her voice moves closer.
The point I withhold is the resolution. The killer’s identity isn’t concealed with any real effort, the final confrontation is talky and static, and Pakula hadn’t yet worked out how to end this kind of film. He would.
The Title Character Is the Wrong Subject
Donald Sutherland plays John Klute as a man with almost no surface. He watches, he waits, he says little, and he’s deliberately the least interesting person in the film. That’s a structural decision and a bold one. The film gives its title and its investigation to a man it then declines to be interested in. That frees the entire running time for the person he’s investigating. Sutherland understood the assignment completely. He plays Klute as decency without imagination, a small-town man in a city he doesn’t understand, and his restraint makes Fonda’s material legible by contrast.
He and Fonda were involved off screen during and after the production, and he was her date at the ceremony where she won. None of that warmth reaches the film. That’s either a failure of the romance or the correct choice for a story about a woman who can’t let anybody close.
The romance between them is the film’s least convincing thread and the film seems to know it. Bree tells her therapist that the worst thing about Klute is that he makes her want to be something she’s not sure she can be. That’s more honest than any scene the two of them share together on screen. I’ll take the flat romance in exchange for what Sutherland’s stillness buys. He gives Fonda all the air in every room they share, and I think that generosity is the smartest acting choice in the film.
Your point-of-view character doesn’t have to be your subject. A watchful, incurious protagonist can function as a lens, and the audience will look where he looks without needing him to be interesting himself.
The condition is that the lens mustn’t compete. Give Klute a rich interior life and the film splits, because two absorbing characters in a two-hander produce a tug of war and never a study. Applied to prose: a narrator who withholds his own reactions makes the reader supply them, and the reader will attach that emotional work to whoever is being observed.
Fonda Built Bree Out of Fragments
The performance is assembled from three registers and the film keeps cutting between them. Bree working. That’s a performance she can switch on and off mid-sentence. Bree auditioning. That’s the thing she wants and isn’t getting. Bree in therapy. That’s the only place she says anything true.
The therapy scenes were largely improvised, and Pakula later said he regretted shooting them with one camera because the psychiatrist’s reactions in the takes covering Fonda were the more interesting ones.
What the structure achieves is a character defined by the gap between her accounts of herself. She tells her therapist she prefers the work because in that room she’s in control, and the film has already shown her checking her watch over a client’s shoulder. That’s the same statement without the self-justification.
Fonda was thirty-three and had been a decorative presence in Barbarella three years earlier. This is the film where she reconstructed herself as a serious actor, and she took the Academy Award for it against a strong field.
She researched it by spending time with working women in New York, and the detail shows in the small business of the part. Bree checks a watch, sets a price, manages a client’s mood and closes the transaction, and none of it is presented as degradation or as liberation. It’s presented as a job with procedures.
This is the performance I’d put at the top of Fonda’s career. That watch-check over a client’s shoulder tells me more about Bree than a dozen speeches would, and the therapy scenes have a looseness that makes most screen confessions look rehearsed.
Gordon Willis Invented the Look of the Decade
Willis shot this the year before The Godfather, and the technique is already fully formed. Deep shadow, faces going dark, single sources, long lenses observing people from across rooms. The visual argument is surveillance. The film repeatedly frames Bree through doorways, down corridors, from above, from a rooftop, and puts the audience in the position of the man watching her without ever telling them that’s where they’re standing. That’s why the film belongs in a paranoia sequence with The Parallax View and All the President’s Men. The subject of all three is that somebody is listening, and Klute is the one where the listening is intimate instead of institutional.
The tape recorder is the film’s central object. It opens on one sitting on a dinner table, and the same machine turns out to hold recordings of Bree that the killer plays for his own use. That converts her voice into property.
Michael Small’s score works the same territory. It’s built on a woman’s voice used as an instrument, wordless and slightly off, so the sound of Bree is present in scenes she’s not in. The film has taken her voice away from her before the plot explains that somebody has.
That score creeps me out more than anything the killer does on screen. A wordless woman’s voice drifting through scenes she isn’t in is a nasty, clever idea, and paired with Willis’s shadows it makes the whole film feel overheard.
Choose a physical object that embodies your theme and put it in the first shot without explanation. The reel-to-reel here means nothing on a Thanksgiving table and everything by the end.
Surveillance is a camera position before it’s a plot. Frame your character as though somebody unnamed is doing the observing, consistently, and the dread arrives without a word of dialogue about being followed.
The equivalent in prose is a persistent slight distance in the description of your protagonist. Report her from a few feet further away than feels natural and the reader begins to sense a witness.
What It Was Willing to Show
This sits on a list of films that couldn’t be made today, and the reasons are worth separating, because most of them aren’t about content.
The frankness is real. Bree is a working prostitute presented without moralizing, without a redemption arc, and without the film requiring her to renounce the work as a condition of sympathy. In 1971 almost no studio picture had done it, and it’s still rare. What has changed is the economics. A two and a half million dollar character study with a downbeat middle and a talky climax was a mainstream Warner Bros. release that finished twelfth for the year. That film now goes to a streamer or doesn’t exist.
There’s also the matter of who it was for. The film treats an audience as capable of spending two hours with an unlikeable, self-protective woman without being told how to feel about her, and that assumption is the thing most obviously absent from current studio work. Fonda herself is part of why the film gets read as unrepeatable. She was about to become a deeply divisive public figure in America, and the performance is now inseparable from what happened to her afterward. That’s a burden the film never asked to carry.
The Ending Is the Weak Point
Peter Cable is identified early enough that the last act has no mystery to resolve, so the film has to generate its climax from a confrontation in a garment loft with a man explaining himself.
The explanation is the problem, and it’s where my patience runs out. Cable talks about the ugliness he found in himself, at length, in a scene that stops everything to deliver a psychological account of something the tape recordings had already conveyed better. I’d have cut most of that speech and let the tapes do the talking. Pakula would solve this. The Parallax View three years later refuses explanation entirely and is far more frightening for it, and All the President’s Men keeps its antagonist off screen almost completely. The final scene salvages some of it. Bree packs an apartment while a voiceover from her therapy sessions says she’ll probably be back in a month, and the film ends on uncertainty about whether anything has changed. That ambiguity is the right ending. It’s just attached to a weak one.
An antagonist explaining his own psychology is almost always weaker than the evidence you’ve already shown. If the audience has heard the tapes, the speech is redundant.
When the mystery resolves early, the last act needs a different engine. Pressure on the protagonist works. A monologue from the villain doesn’t, because it transfers the scene to a character nobody has invested in.
Note what the closing voiceover does. It undercuts the resolution without denying it. That lets the film end truthfully on a character who has changed provisionally and might not stay changed.
Should you watch Klute?
Yes, for Fonda and for Willis. The 8 is for her performance and his camera, with points off because the last act turns into a lecture from a killer I’d stopped wondering about long before he opens his mouth. Go in expecting a character study wearing the coat of a thriller, and watch how often the camera sits where somebody would stand if they were watching her.
