It’s 1972 and the United States is facing challenges both at home and abroad. The Vietnam War is still raging but public opinion has turned strongly against it, while on home soil, groups like The Weather Underground are becoming increasingly violent in their anti-government action. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon is preparing for a looming election, and then, roughly four months before ballots are cast, the Watergate Hotel is broken into with the aim of wiretapping the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Never had the public or media witnessed political treachery on this scale, nor an operation that potentially reached all the way up to the White House. However, as the lengthily and overly explanatory titled “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House” posits, the nation was in safe hands because as the whistleblower makes clear early on, the FBI is one of the “two cockpits” that guide the country. (As Eddie Marsan explains later, the CIA is another one). It’s an assertion that’s never quite convincing.
Essentially telling the story of “All The President’s Men” from the other side of the coin, the film from writer/director Peter Landesman (who specializes in ensemble, true life stories — see “Parkland” and “Concussion”) brings us an almost ethically unimpeachable Mark Felt (Liam Neeson), whose only flaw might be loving his country too much. Next in line to head the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s long reign, he doesn’t make it easy for the torch to be passed. Felt bumps against the Nixon administration who want a more transactional relationship with long independent government branch, and this friction only intensifies as Watergate happens. Fully committed to investigating the break in regardless of political repercussions, Felt’s determination is partially fuelled when he’s passed over for his long promised job for Nixon ally Pat Gray (Marton Csokas), an outsider to the agency who is less married to their ideals of standing apart from any White House influence. But Felt is also driven by his unshakeable belief that the job has to be done right, and when Gray starts tightening the leash, the veteran agent will do whatever it takes for the full truth to emerge.
It’s a potentially fascinating story, but “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House” is about as engaging as an episode of “House Of Cards” you forgot you watched. Mark Felt almost never makes a wrong step in his mission to expose the full scale of what happened at Watergate, so the film attempts to find his flaws at home — only to eventually pin them on his wife Audrey (Diane Lane). Their daughter Joan (Maika Monroe) has run away, and been out of contact for a full year. When Felt isn’t trying to navigate the shark filled waters of Washington, he’s quietly trying to track down his child… yes, Liam Neeson, the star of “Taken,” once again has to find his daughter. It’s a bit surprising that no one involved with the film thought about the optics of that subplot, which winds up being fairly superfluous anyway, and doesn’t add the emotional tenor that was likely intended.
From a technical standpoint, ‘Mark Felt’ is fairly dry as well, with a certain lack of panache from a visual standpoint. However, if there’s one element that shines it’s the score from Daniel Pemberton, who delivers the stately brass you’d expect from a story set in Washington D.C., but smears the edges with static and pulsing electronics, providing the picture an insistent pulse that, dramatically, it never quite matches. If the directorial approach is bloodless, so too are the performances. Neeson stands ramrod straight and tall as Felt, and makes all the right moves that the script demands of his character — nothing more, nothing less. Meanwhile, the supporting cast keeps all the moving parts of the story going as required, but also without much definition. The only moment the picture finds some color occurs when Bruce Greenwood enters the picture, playing a Time Magazine editor, who meets with Mark Felt and becomes one of the media partners who help the agent light a fire under the White House. Neeson and Greenwood are great together, sharing an easy chemistry in their brief time together that transmits Felt’s difficulty in breaking protocol more than any other moment in the film.
Given everything that’s happening with the current administration, “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House” couldn’t be more timely, yet those parallels never quite resonate. While it’s not the responsibility of Landesman to reflect on events he couldn’t know would unfold when filming took place, there is a certain lack of relatability that’s still difficult to ignore. Ultimately, ‘Mark Felt’ feels like cinematic homework; a movie you should watch, because it’s an important story, but one you’ll be glad to put away and move onto something else. [C]