Review: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

The story of Mark Felt (Liam Neeson), who served dutifully as #2 at the FBI for many years. However, when J. Edgar Hoover was replaced by Nixon-friendly outsider Pat Gray (Marton Csokas) and not him, Felt becomes increasingly disenchanted. He feels the Nixon administration is impeding the Watergate investigation in particular. Eventually he decides to blow the whistle, a very risky move. Diane Lane plays Felt’s unstable wife, Tony Goldwyn and Josh Lucas play FBI men, and Tom Sizemore plays the opposite side of the coin to Felt, a disgraced FBI man always skulking around.

I was really rooting for this 2017 biopic from writer-director Peter Landesman (The quite good Will Smith sports/drama “Concussion”). Unlike the overrated Spielberg pic “The Post”, I felt like this film might’ve found a fresh wrinkle to a story already told effectively in “All the President’s Men”. And yes indeed it has done that, telling us the story of the man known as ‘Deep Throat’ who helped journalist Bob Woodward in bringing down the presidency of Richard Nixon. However, it’s still not a wholly successful film, in spite of a really solid cast from top to bottom. In fact, in this too-brief telling many of the cast end up getting short shrift, sadly. Diane Lane (who should be an Oscar-winner by now, right? Are we all agreed on that?), Tony Goldwyn, and Josh Lucas in particular deserve better than they’re afforded here. If ever a film needed to be longer, it’s this one. Also, it needed a different title because “The Man Who Brought Down the White House” (even longer if you add “Mark Felt” to the beginning of it as the opening credits of the film do) is one helluva mouthful.

Liam Neeson is rock-solid in the lead role, although the real-life Felt looked more like Vladimir Putin with a toupee, from pictures I’ve seen. I only looked the man up afterwards though, so for 90 minutes or so Neeson 100% convinced me. The film would be so much lesser without him, and for once he’s not unleashing krav maga on Eastern European thugs. It’s also good to see Tom Sizemore doing good work in a film of relative prestige, albeit one that basically flopped. The actor wears his tumultuous life all over his face, but his sleazy presence is perfect for the role of a former colleague of Felt’s whom he cannot stand and who appears to have gone to seed. Michael C. Hall also impresses early as Nixon administration advisor John Dean, and Bruce Greenwood is solid as usual playing journalist Sandy Smith. Greenwood seems to turn up in a lot of these films about real-life figures (“Thirteen Days”, “Capote”, “Mao’s Last Dancer”, “Devil’s Knot”, “Truth” etc.), and generally he’s a pretty fine presence to have around. Marton Csokas isn’t in my estimation a good actor, however he is pitch-perfect for the role he plays here. It might actually be his best work to date as a humourless FBI head with loyalties to the Nixon administration. The director might be charged with under-using his actors, but he can’t be accused of miscasting them in my view, even if no one here is a dead-ringer for their counterparts. Special mention should go to composer Daniel Pemberton (“The Awakening”, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”) for contributing an excellent score.

Probably just shy of a recommendation here, and that’s a shame. The cast is game and the perspective is somewhat new, but writer-director Landesman ultimately fails to deliver with a frankly underdone treatment of pretty fascinating real-life material. This really could’ve been something.

Rating: C+