[rating=5.00]
Even now, over 40 years after the fact, it’s stunning to realize just how fast and how far President Richard Nixon fell. Watergate was a watershed moment for American politics, one that dispelled any notions we might have held about the president and the office of the presidency. It confirmed that no man, no matter how high that man might sit, is above the law, and that neither the people nor the law would tolerate illegal activity from the White House.
Historically speaking, it’s even more stunning that the downfall of the Nixon administration was orchestrated primarily by a single man, Mark Felt. As the second in command of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, Felt was privy to all the dirt and all the secrets, the same as his boss. He was known as the consummate G-man, the law enforcement official that set the standard. He valued his position highly, as well as the position and autonomy of the FBI. As the Nixon administration attempted to interfere with the workings of the agency, Felt retaliated by leaking damning information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post.
Mark Felt was “Deep Throat,” the famed source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Pulitzer Prize winning investigations into the Watergate scandal which toppled Nixon and forced him to resign in disgrace. For decades, he existed in secrecy, unknown to the public as anything other than Deep Throat. In All the President’s Men, he was a shadowy, unnamed figure who loomed large, but we still didn’t know who he was or anything about the man behind the name.
The man behind that iconic moniker is finally explored in Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House. Unfortunately, the results are somewhat underwhelming.
Writer/director Peter Landesman (Concussion) has a keen knack for taking interesting slices of history and dulling them down, ripping them of heart and soul even when pulling fine performances from his cast. It’s a trend he started with Parkland, which examined the chaos and horror at Parkland hospital in Dallas on the day of the JFK assassination, and continued with Concussion, his toothless look at the NFL CPE coverup. Mark Felt is better than either of his two previous films, but still lacks a certain depth that would’ve made it a truly great work.
Despite fantastic performances from his cast, which includes Liam Neeson as Felt, Diane Lane as Felt’s wife, Aubrey, and Marton Csokas as L. Patrick Gray, Nixon’s handpicked successor to Hoover, Mark Felt suffers from a crisis of identity. It tries to walk the line between deep diving biopic and taut espionage drama, and though it never quite fails at either aim, it never quite succeeds, either. Both sides of this narrative seem to work against each other, and never manage to gel into a full cohesive and unified whole.
Still, the net effect does work to humanize the man who was, for decades, shrouded in mystery and innuendo. Neeson’s performance is superb, and he works to show just how conflicted Felt was about what he was doing and why. One scene, which intentionally echoes All the President’s Men, finds Felt meeting with Woodward (Julian Morris) in a darkened parking garage, only instead of the stoic figure of mystery, Felt is troubled near to a breaking point by the goings on of the administration.
As imbued with emotion as Neeson’s performance is, the script never lingers long enough to allow the tension to truly build. For a story with as much potential for depth as this has, the dive is exceptionally shallow. Mark Felt is played like a dark espionage thriller, but that angle doesn’t work here since we already know the eventual outcome. Even though it allows us access to the side of the story that All the President’s Men couldn’t show us, it feels like a rote procedural drama more than anything else.
So, too, with the film’s other half, which looks briefly at the personal life of the man who was Deep Throat. The crux of this competing narrative is the rising tensions in his marriage following the disappearance of his adult daughter Joan. This subplot pops up seemingly at random throughout the film, and is never given the weight it feels like it deserves. We’re meant, of course, to see this as a humanizing arc, and it is touching to know that while Felt was busy bringing down one of the most corrupt administrations in U.S. history he was also dealing with intense family drama.
As is, however, the family drama feels like a distraction from the political intrigue, and vice versa. Since the film’s premiere at TIFF earlier this year, much has been made about the cuts Mark Felt underwent following its completion. Neeson himself lamented how much of the film was left on the cutting room floor, with specific emphasis placed on Lane’s character, whose screen time is limited though powerful. I suspect that a longer cut of this film would mend many of its problems, and make for a better cinematic experience overall.
It would be nice if there was a balance of the narratives, for example, and if the competing narratives worked together to form a better whole, rather than feeling like two independent pieces vying for your attentions. There’s a decent movie in here somewhere, much of which may have been left unseen, and the performances themselves are worth watching. Unfortunately, the majority of what we’ve been given is a bit of a letdown, and fails to get to the heart of this fascinating and important story.
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House is now playing in theaters everywhere.
