Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

Liam Neeson is Mark Felt in Mark Felt, which attempts to tell the story of the man who was Deep Throat (the Watergate source who helped bring down Nixon, not the, uh, other one). With a strong cast and a story that’s — at the very least — accidentally topical on paper, Mark Felt should be much better than it is. In reality, it’s a lukewarm attempt at a kind of thriller, one with no thrills and no real tension, which has a difficult time deciding how to be both true to its subject and entertaining, while being mired in a lot of wrong moves, especially tonally.

Neeson plays Felt, the righthand man to J. Edgar Hoover and — for all intents and purposes — the de facto director of the FBI in Hoover’s twilight years. He’s a figure that Nixon’s White House finds intimidating, not just for being the “G-Man’s G-man” — who takes his duties in the FBI, as murky as they might sometimes be, very seriously — but who also never forgets anything, especially other people’s secrets. Going against the White House and damaging the integrity of the FBI in the process when it becomes obvious that Nixon is interfering in the Watergate investigation becomes the main struggle for Felt.

He is a man of honor who perceives the FBI’s charge to maintain order, independent of anyone and everything (even the White House), which is all fine as a place to start with as a character study. But the film has nowhere to go with this and struggles with the idea of the gray area Felt operates in. Mark Felt only briefly touches on Felt’s less-than-admirable traits, such as being convicted of civil rights violations, and tries to shoo them way too easily with explanations that he’s just a good company man.

But all of this, admittedly, is a small aspect of Felt’s story, one that might have added nuance and complexity but that’s skipped over in favor of the Watergate scandal and Deep Throat. And that’s understandable, of course, but the film wants to rush over all the details. In a way, I’m fine with this. It keeps the movie short enough, but it never feels quite taut enough. There’s no real heightening of tension; rather, the film runs at a pretty standard pace throughout before pretty much just ending. As someone who’s not quite at the age to know the ins and outs of the Watergate story, it seems that the material is presented in a flimsy manner.

A lot of this just comes down to my own issues with Peter Landesman’s (Concussion) direction. He lets Neeson play Felt at peak, grumbly Neeson, while the strangely overdone performance by Marton Csokas (The Equalizer) can be distracting at times. All of it’s wrapped inside a lot of shaky, handheld camerawork, extraneous close-ups and a repetitive score that’s never allowed to let up. There are obviously high-minded ambitions here, and the topicality of Nixon’s scandals in today’s political climate should have allowed the film to fall backward into some type of relevance. Instead, these miscues make it little more than forgettable. Rated PG-13 for some language. Now playing at Grail Moviehouse.