Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Lane, Marton Csokas, Ike Barinholtz, Tony Goldwyn, Tom Sizemore, Bruce Greenwood, Michael C. Hall, Brian d’Arcy James, Josh Lucas

Rated: 5/10

Those who know Watergate will somewhat understand this drama based on history. Those who don’t will have to take to Wikipedia to understand what’s going on with Mark Felt (Liam Neeson) who plays the second in command of FBI of the 70s.

Watergate has, over the years, become a symbolic term for all sorts of political scandals, worldwide. But the original, despite the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon, is yet to fully unravel. No one, for example, still knows the real intent behind the break-in into the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington DC, or for that matter how deep the rut actually ran in the re-election campaign of Nixon who, by the way, amid allegations and speculations, enjoyed a landslide win.

But this one was more about the enigmatic, home troubled, superseded FBI man who for his long 31 years with the organisation always fought for the independence of the service from any kind of political interference by the White House.

So when the administration appoints a crony to head and hide the goings-on (like tapping phones etc of the Democrats and others), Felt obviously felt bad, but more so his wife Audrey did. Neeson does a fine job of looking like the lean, mean and silent original Felt who, incidentally, passed in 2008 — but only after admitting to Vanity Fair magazine that he was, indeed, the man who brought down the White House, as Deep Throat the name given by the media to the man who leaked all the secrets uncovering the Watergate scam to Washington Post reporters.

But for Felt, FBI would have long become the handmaiden of the Nixon administration but he was a man who had many big secrets on big, usually bad men and he used it as a weapon to stay in and implode.

The film, however, takes it for granted that we all know Watergate by heart. It does not pause to explain and sadly uses the main subject as a given and thus unfolds it as a flesh to the main story. It moves slowly, much too slowly for a viewership so far removed from the Nixon era and its scams to actually appreciate this history nugget, without much of drama and pace.

A thriller would have been more welcome on one of America’s raciest political scams that almost impeached its President.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 10 December, 2017