Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought down the White House
There’s such a thing as sheer luck, and “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” benefits from it. It’s the story of a career FBI officer, the second in line behind J. Edgar Hoover, whose covert leaks to the Washington Post — as “Deep Throat” — led to the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Written and directed by Peter Landesman, this film has been in development for more than a decade. It was cast in 2015 and began filming in the spring of 2016. Were it released a year or two or 10 ago, it would have been regarded as a competent, reasonably engrossing but intermittently dull glimpse of a historical event as experienced from a revealing new angle. To be sure, “Mark Felt” is precisely that. But watched today, in light of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump administration, it has an extra intensity, as a possible preview of coming attractions.
The movie fairly highlights the crucial importance of this one man’s action. There’s a tendency, for example, to compare the situation today with that which existed in the early 1970s and to conclude, for example, that Trump is much safer than Nixon ever was, because Nixon had to deal with a Democratic Congress. What we don’t fully appreciate is that Nixon’s ironclad control of the executive branch, with cronies installed within the FBI and at the head of the Department of Justice, almost killed the Watergate investigation in the crib.
The story begins in 1972, with Felt (Liam Neeson) as a 59-year-old G-man, having spent half his life at the FBI. With the death of director Hoover in April, Felt expects to be elevated to the top spot, but Nixon wants his own guy in there, L. Patrick Gray (Marton Csokas). When the Watergate scandal breaks, Felt has to watch as evidence is suppressed and investigations are curtailed. He sees his own director and the attorney general mischaracterize findings and make false statements. And he is outraged.
As played by Neeson, Felt is a forbidding figure, stern and austere almost to the point of creepy, not a campus radical but the opposite type of Nixon enemy — a rigid straight shooter. Felt just doesn’t like crime, and so, in the pursuit of justice, he does something that would seem almost impossible for someone with a long career in secrecy. He starts leaking to the press. He’s so desperate to get the story out that he’s willing to feed his information to a 29-year-old novice, one who, as luck would have it, just happens to be Bob Woodward at the start of a great career in journalism.
With “All the President’s Men” forever emblazoned in our collective consciousness, it’s fun, or at least illuminating, to see some of these same scenes from Deep Throat’s point of view. Given his position, Felt was privy to highly classified information. Every time he fed something to Woodward, his bosses (including Nixon himself ) knew that only a handful of people had access to that information. Felt’s task was to feed Woodward just enough to keep the investigation alive, while never revealing his own hand. Interestingly, the movie suggests that Felt may have been hoping, through his leaks, to prevent Nixon’s re-election. Instead, Nixon won in a 49-state landslide.
All the Watergate material in “Mark Felt” is gripping, and one wishes it were the movie’s entire focus. Instead, Landesman spends time on Felt’s relationship with his tempestuous wife (Diane Lane) and with his sadness over a missing daughter who ran off to join a hippie commune. Landesman and the actors do their best, but they can’t make Felt’s private life as interesting as his covert life. No one could.
Still, there’s enough about Watergate here to make slogging through the personal stuff worth it. In the end, “Mark Felt” is reassuring, because it suggests that the American system is so brilliantly constructed that, no matter how strenuous and persuasive is the lying, and how powerful the liars, one person in possession of the truth can bring down a corrupt administration.