Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (2017)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Good start, but then it gets ruined

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

I watched this at home on DVD from my public library. It is timely as almost the same thing is happening in the Washington today. It complements the 1976 movie "All the President's Men" which focuses on the role of the Washington Post reporters.In 1972 several man were caught breaking into the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate hotel. As the FBI began to look into it there was evidence that the men had ties to the White House and to Nixon himself. Liam Neeson as Mark Felt, a 30-year FBI man who was the Associate FBI director under Hoover, gets involved. Then Hoover unexpectedly died but Felt was not appointed as interim FBI Director. Maybe that helped him decide to do what he did.Stifled by orders from the White House to complete the Watergate investigation quickly, Felt used the power of the press, purposely leaking information to a reporter he had known for some time, by use of public pay phones or clandestine meetings. Eventually pressure cracked the cases, many of Nixon's staff went to prison, Nixon himself resigned in shame.Neeson is great in this role, some think the movie moves too slowly and is too long but I think it was ideally made. I was a young adult in 1972, I remember Watergate and Nixon's resignation. This movie is welcome to fill in who became known as "deep throat."

In the bonus track of the DVD of "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House," the film's writer-director Peter Landesman, described enthusiastically how he attempted to depict in the story of lifelong FBI official Mark Felt as "the self-sacrifice of heroism in the face of massive corruption." But for many reasons, Landesman, a talented writer and director, failed to evoke a cinematic superhero in Mark Felt.First, the production values of the film were dark, gloomy, and depressing. Landesman used an antique anamorphic camera lens in the effort to evoke the early 1970s and an aura of suspense. But the results were downright depressing. It was odd that in the bonus track, one of the performers described the 1970s as an exciting time to be alive. But the look of the film resembled a morgue and an ashen-faced Liam Neeson taking on the aura of a galvanized corpse.Second, the overall treatment of the Watergate scandal was superficially treated. The film artists described the environment of the FBI as "black and white" when in fact there were many shades of grey. The men in suits in this film were uniformly depicted as thugs, as opposed to the clean-cut and impeccably dressed men of the Hoover era. The film actually took on the feel of "The Godfather." Third, the film suffered from the subplot of Mark Felt's family, including his marriage to a Lady Macbeth-type wife (Diane Lane) and a daughter who, understandably, had fled home to live in a California commune in Ben Lomand in the wilds of Northern California. Kudos to young Joan for figuring out her parents and making an early exit!Above all, the film failed to probe deeply into the Watergate scandal itself. It was not one man who brought down the president, as the film tried to project. It is likely that after Nixon's trip to China, the intelligence network had had enough of Nixon, and Watergate was the "silent coup" involving multiple participants in the intelligence community, who saw the removal of Nixon from office as being in the best interests of the nation.One of the most important lines in the film was the assertion that "the FBI is an independent body," as opposed to a branch of the federal government that is part of the Department of Justice. The filmmakers missed a golden opportunity to use the story of Mark Felt as an example of how in the years following World War II and continuing to the present, we really have four branches of our government: the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and, as is all too apparent today, the national security network.

The story of Mark Felt, who under the name "Deep Throat" helped journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in 1972. Mark Felt suffers from a thin plot and a boring and predictable direction and story we've seen before in better films. (0/10)

I was unfamiliar with the Watergate scandal before watching this movie. I am still unfamiliar with it. The storytelling of this movie is beyond awful; its structure is terrible. It was made by writers and a director that clearly lack talent. Furthermore, Liam Neeson's deliberate pitch-shifting was irritating.