Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House is a word jumble of a title for an average movie with sometimes clunky dialogue – and I know this is a strange way to begin a review for a movie that will be somewhat positive. Premiering here at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film stars Liam Neeson as the mysterious “Deep Throat,” the man who who leaked information to The Washington Post, which eventually resulted in Richard Nixon resigning from office.
(Look, I’m not at all suggesting the filmmakers use a title that’s smutty just because the name Deep Throat is involved, but there has to be something a little more exciting in there. How about “Deep Throat: The Mark Felt Story”? Okay, I’m starting to see the problem; even that title makes it seem like Mark Felt is a porn star. I’m not sure there’s a solution to this problem.)
Directed by Peter Landesman (Parkland, Concussion), the narrative of Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (seriously, this title has to go) nestles comfortably in between Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar and Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. When the film opens, Hoover has just died, leaving a huge hole at the FBI. Mark Felt is second-in-command behind Hoover (at least temporarily) and can see his Bureau, and everything Felt stands for, crumbling around him as Nixon inserts cronies to run the FBI – eventually putting a kibosh on the whole Watergate investigation because Nixon wants it to go away.
Felt is portrayed as the model of integrity. He’s an agent’s agent, and certainly not someone who would ever leak classified information to the press. Well, of course we know now that Mark Felt was Deep Throat, but certainly no one suspected him then – at least not at first.
Here’s the thing about this movie: It can be clunky as hell. In a meeting with Bob Woodward in a parking garage (basically the same scene we saw in All the President’s Men, only from the other perspective, which is interesting on its own), Felt tells Woodward (played by Julian Morris, who looks nothing like Robert Redford) that this information would be disastrous to the Nixon administration if it got out before November 7th. After a pause, Woodward says to the camera, “That’s election day!” There are a lot of moments like this in Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House.
But! This is one of those movies that I chalk up to being educational. I didn’t know that much about Mark Felt other than he was fairly high up in the FBI and then leaked information that brought down a president. So, regardless of the film’s problems, I still found it compelling. Plus, Liam Neeson makes a great Mark Felt. But the problem is the filmmakers kind of assume the audience doesn’t know much about anything and feels the need to explain things that should be common knowledge to pretty much anyone who took a high school history class.
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (please get a new title) does its job of presenting who Mark Felt was and what a burden it was for him personally to betray his beloved FBI. And if you want to know more about Felt (or, maybe, you just like Liam Neeson), then Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House does its job. But, I’d recommend anyone palette cleanse after by watching All the President’s Men.
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