Meet Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat’
IN Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Liam Neeson delivers a still, almost marmoreal performance as the anonymous source who came to be known as Deep Throat during the Watergate era, and who kept his identity a secret until 2005, when he revealed himself in Vanity Fair magazine.
Felt, deputy associate director at the FBI under J Edgar Hoover, had long been a contender in the Washington parlour game of speculation as to Deep Throat’s true identity. An ambitious and practiced bureaucratic knife fighter, he was reportedly incensed when he didn’t get the top job at the bureau when Hoover died, in 1972.
The Watergate break-in occurred just six weeks later, putting Felt in the middle of a fastmoving criminal investigation, an almost Oedipal succession drama at an organisation he considered his home, and threats to the FBI’S existence from a paranoid White House. Writerdirector Peter Landesman (Parkland, Concussion) puts those elements into play with direct if unimaginative efficiency in Mark Felt, which focuses on the title character’s psychological and emotional motives for becoming the most famous leaker of the 20th century.
The pallid grey of his skin melting into a mane of similarly colourless hair – Felt was reportedly called the “white rat” inside the bureau – Neeson cuts an eerie, ghostlike presence, infusing suspense and dynamism into a portrait of a man thinking about his next move.
Although bare-knuckled careerism was doubtlessly part of Felt’s mental machinations, Landesman prefers to see Felt as a hero – and a prescient one, given the story’s resonance with the firing of FBI director James B Comey and the investigations that have engulfed the Trump administration. As an avatar for the much maligned “deep state”, Landesman’s Felt isn’t a rat, but a paragon of institutional memory, personal ethics and self-sacrifice.
Those who consider Felt a more Cromwellian figure might take issue with the lionising. But Mark Felt nonetheless presents an absorbing alternate view to a story that most Americans know from the 1976 thriller All the President’s Men.
Tony Goldwyn, Brian D’arcy James and Josh Lucas do their best as Felt’s dogged associates, with Lucas delivering an especially amusing turn as a loyal minion who slowly realises his boss might be a mole.
As usual, Diane Lane is graceful and sympathetic as Felt’s emotionally fragile wife, Audrey, with whom he is coping with a runaway teenage daughter. That domestic subplot figures into the motivations that drive Mark Felt.
As alternate history and a showcase for a fine Neeson characterisation, Mark Felt offers an intriguing if incomplete view of a man who remains inscrutable, 40 years after the fact. – The Washington Post