Movie Review: 'Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House'

It baffles me that any filmmaker could screw up making a movie about Mark Felt. How is it possible to fumble a subject so timely, important, historic, and filled with all of the great cinematic trappings. I’m left baffled by the movie Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House. This Liam Neeson-starring drama should have been a slam dunk. This a subject that should be front and center in the day and age of a President who faces pressures that only Richard Nixon could truly relate to.

Mark Felt (Liam Neeson) is an FBI lifer, J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand. Felt is credited by some as being the man who restrained some of Hoover’s worst instincts in the director’s later years, or at least the film would have you believe that. When we meet Mark Felt in the titular movie about him, he is facing down Richard Nixon’s West Wing staff who’ve heard rumors that Hoover is ready to step aside. The implication of the conversation is that if Felt can show he will play ball with the White House, he will be the next FBI Director. When Felt demonstrates his loyalty to Hoover over Nixon, the die is cast.

When Hoover passes away, Felt and his team are thrown into a political maelstrom. L. Patrick Gray (Martin Csokas) is named interim director and being that he was just Nixon’s man in the Justice Department prior to this posting, Felt is aware of where Gray’s loyalties lie and what that means for the independence of the FBI. When Watergate hits, things only grow more harrowing and Felt, a man dedicated to keeping secrets, suddenly finds himself in the position of having to reveal them.

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House has a story that is all tee’d up for the filmmakers. The story is rife with political intrigue and spy play on top of having a historic significance that could not ring more familiar and timely. Unfortunately, writer-director Peter Landesman is just too clumsy to bring it together. Landesman’s writing and direction are all over the place, especially the script which is a shamble of expository dialogue and sloppy scene-setting.

For a guy who worked in the FBI for 30 years and has met just about everyone in Washington, D.C for one reason or another, Mark Felt has people introducing themselves to him a lot, mostly people he’s known for years. Early in the film there are three instances of characters whom Mark Felt has worked with for years who feel the need to recite their name and position in Mark’s life as if he didn’t know them. I’m being snarky. I know it’s not for Mark’s benefit; it’s for ours as an audience. That said, other history-based movies have been made without the necessity to be so awkward as to have characters introducing themselves to people they already know.

There is a subplot in Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House that is intended to let Felt off the hook for his investigation of the radical group, The Weather Underground. According to the film, Felt employed tactics outside the law to track the Weather Underground because he believed his missing daughter, Joan (Maika Monroe), had taken up with the group. Somehow, a father’s love is supposed to justify an FBI Agent overstepping his authority in the eyes of Mr. Landesman. Too bad the father-daughter nonsense is merely soporific nonsense in an unnecessary subplot, shoehorned into a movie that needed to focus on Watergate and not on Felt’s personal life.

Mark Felt deserves a Scorsese movie treatment, a filmmaker with the vision and talent to cohere Felt’s unique place in history into the kind of wide ranging narrative with the bigness of history and the cloistered, close quartered, hot-house spy stuff that make the story so cinematic. Felt’s place in history requires a filmmaker who understands just how important what Felt did was in the 1970s and remains today. Peter Landesman is not that filmmaker.

This isn’t the first time Landesman has taken a big swing and a miss at a historic narrative. His directorial debut Parkland was another sloppy attempt to bring major history to the big screen as it covered the chaos in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy and failed to bring the historic event into one cohesive narrative. Landesman improved his take on history with the 2015 drama Concussion, but even that film about the important topic of NFL head injuries came up just short of what it should have been, failing to make the impact the story was intended for.

Mark Felt deserves better than Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White. Grandiose title aside, the film fails to bring home how important Mark Felt is to American history and to modern history. Right now, the next Mark Felt may be hard at work behind the scenes in Washington, D.C and what will we do with that person’s legacy if we can’t get the story of Deep Throat right?