All The President’s Men told us Woodward & Bernstein’s side of the Watergate story. Nixon told us the disgraced president’s side of the story. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House could have finished the circle and given us a great look into Deep Throat’s side of the story. Instead, it just lays there as a dark, sad biopic almost nobody will see.
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (Liam Neeson, Tony Galbreath, Diane Lane, Josh Lucas, Marton Csokas) – It is mindboggling how many mistakes the producers (which include Ridley Scott, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, and Peter Guber) and writer/director Peter Landesman made in turning the story of Deep Throat into a commercial movie. Mark Felt was the veteran FBI Associate Director turned media source in the biggest political story of the 20th century, known affectionately as Watergate.
I ranted for a half hour after viewing this soon-to-be-forgotten film. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House could have been such a good and important movie. Instead, it is a dark, brutal, tortured biopic that is failing miserably at the box office. I am sure that it is true to the book written by Felt and John D. O’Connor. Felt was the “G-man’s G-man,” a buttoned down, formal disciple of J. Edgar Hoover whose love and devotion for the FBI was deep and heartfelt. The movie certainly depicts his agony with betraying everything he stood for in order to make sure that the truth came out about the cover-up surrounding the break-in at the Watergate, the dirty tricks undertaken by Richard Nixon and his cronies, and the abuses of power by the Nixon White House.
Agony and torture are the right words. Apparently, Landesman and the producers decided that Felt’s story needed to be told in the most audience unfriendly way. For once, I am sure that, despite my lack of knowledge about making movies, I could have produced a commercially and critically successful movie using this material.
Here is what I would have done. First, I would have called it “Deep Throat: The Story Behind Watergate.” (No one wants to know the life story of Mark Felt. But lots of people want to know Deep Throat’s side of the Watergate story.) Next, I would have started the movie in the basement of the parking garage where Felt insisted he meet with Bob Woodward to dose out the hidden secrets of the biggest scandal in the nation’s history. I then would have flashed back …. to Felt’s climb up the agency to becoming J. Edgar Hoover’s right-hand man. The rest plays out naturally with Felt leading the investigation, being thwarted by the White House, the CIA, and his own interim boss, Pat Gray. I would have focused on those meetings with Woodward, the ones so perfectly depicted in All the President’s Men. What was Felt’s take on those meetings and the Washington Post reporter’s slow progress? How did Felt evade detection even as some in the White House suspected him? Why did he have Woodward place a flag in his planter on the balcony to signal him about the need to meet? Anyway, I have a hundred questions I want to know.
Mark Felt answers only a few of these, and none of the most intriguing questions. Liam Neeson is very good even if he couldn’t completely rid himself of that Irish accent. The star-studded supporting cast does well as intensely serious, boring, and one-dimensional characters right out of The Untouchables but without the violence. The soundtrack is ominous and foreboding while the cinematography is dark and grainy. In short, this film reminds me of The Insider, the Al Pacino – Russell Crowe box office failure about a tobacco industry whistleblower whose life is made miserable by his ex-employer. Both are self-important films nobody saw because they forgot about trying to make it attractive to viewers. There is another difference: Neeson isn’t Pacino and Landesman isn’t Michael Mann.
Even for Watergate nerds like me, this movie is a disappointment. All The President’s Men, the definitive Oscar nominated film about Watergate adapted from the Woodward and Bernstein book, starred Redford and Hoffman. It was designed to appeal to the masses even though we all knew the story.
Mark Felt is the opposite. And that is too bad. Hanks and Goetzman should have turned this into a Playtone TV movie on the History Channel.