Some 32 years after its release, Alan J. Pakula’s All The President’s Men suddenly feels like a touchstone for 2018’s cinematic releases. Firstly, Steven Spielberg’s The Post acted as a quasi-prequel outlining an investigation at The Washington Post pre-Watergate. Now Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (a title longer than the film will run in cinemas) does a deeper dive into Deep Throat, revealed to be Felt in 2005 by Vanity Fair, the whistleblower’s whistleblower who kept journalist Bob Woodward on the right track to topple Nixon’s government. Yet where Pakula’s film is pacy, vital and engrossing, writer-director Peter Landesman’s (Parkland, Concussion) is a slow, inert, fitfully engaging portrait of an uninteresting man who did an important thing.
The story starts with the death of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in May 1972. Felt (Neeson), a loyal Hoover foot soldier, seems to be his obvious successor. Yet he is passed over by Nixon in favour of ex-Navy officer L. Patrick Gray (Csokas), a strong ally of the President, kick-starting some not-particularly-riveting machinations between colourless FBI types (played by the likes of Josh Lucas, Tony Goldwyn and Tom Sizemore) hampered by ham-fisted exposition and a lack of narrative urgency. The gloomy blue lighting scheme is designed to add mystery; instead it gives the proceedings an airless quality.
When the Watergate scandal emerges, Landesman argues that Felt is driven less by exposing corruption and more by a desire to protect the Bureau’s independence from an outsider. He sidelines Felt’s underground car-park dealings with Bob Woodward (a boyish Julian Morris) in favour of TIME magazine’s Sandy Smith, played by Bruce Greenwood. These scenes, in a run-down diner, crackle and give you a sense of the kind of film Mark Felt might have been.
Neeson cuts an imposing figure, but not even he can translate Felt’s innate sense of decency into something compelling. Landesman tries to round Felt out with glimpses into his family life — his depressed wife (Diane Lane) and runaway daughter (Maika Monroe) — but it feels like an addendum. It’s a film that should hum with contemporary relevance — Felt’s snitching is a forerunner of James Comey’s memo leaking — but it doesn’t make the sparks fly. This is partly due to Landesman’s storytelling and partly to Felt himself. Some men are meant to remain in the shadows.
