Dustin Hoffman Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, when he was 21. "It was a great experience for me," he said. "All my life I had wanted to get inside a prison or a mental hospital. . . . I wanted to get inside where behavior, human behavior, was so exposed. All the things the rest of us were feeling and stopping up were coming out of these people." He used that experience to help him develop the character of Raymond Babbitt, a high-functioning autistic savant, yet a person who critic David Denby described as "a strangely shuttered genius." Hoffman created certain
Dustin Hoffman as earlier ones, had Hoffman take on a dramatically different character than his previous one (as Lenny Bruce). Author James Morrison compares the two roles: "As Lenny Bruce in "Lenny" (1974), Hoffman plays a martyr to the cause of establishment oppression, while in "All the President's Men", he plays a reporter exposing presidential malfeasance." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" described the film as "a spellbinding detective story". "The strength of the movie", he added, was "the virtually day-to-day record of the way Bernstein and Woodward conducted their investigations." The characters portrayed by Hoffman and Redford shared the rank