George Bernard Shaw once said “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” There is a lot of truth in that quote, mostly because we take the pieces of history that best fit to what we already made our mind up to being the truth. In the early Seventies an event happened that still has stories being told about it to this day. These stories have been told from many angles but one angle that has not been told was that of the source of all the information we already know. We knew the source of Watergate was a man code-named “Deep Throat”, and it wasn’t until 2005 that we learned who that was and this is his story.
Mark Felt (Liam Neeson) is what you call a company man, only this company is the F.B.I. Having served the bureau for thirty years, Felt is quite simply the “G” mans “G” man. Felt’s world changes when J. Edgar Hoover dies suddenly and when there is a break in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices. Those two events change his career path as people are put in place to put a lid on things and to lead the investigation in a way that would keep the true people responsible for it out of harms way. Felt sees the moves being made and starts to make his own as the acting director of the bureau is one of the President’s men, thus compromising the investigation. Felt is left to make a choice, to be the company man he has always been or to expose the truth, a truth that would bring down all the President’s men and eventually, the President himself.
Hearing the many angles of a story is for me an important thing. Having heard the side from the deliver of the Watergate scandal in films like “All the President’s Men”, we could only hope we would one day hear the story of their source. Well that day has come and they couldn’t have found a better person to play the man we would learn was Deep Throat in Liam Neeson. There is something in his delivery, be it in telling you about skills he possesses or how the F.B.I. wrote down so many secrets’ that you should feel safe about. When it comes to the role of Felt, Neeson disappears almost in it as he looks far from the action hero we know him as now, as he looks like a man who has fought many battles. The cast lead by Neeson is by far the strongest point in the story, which was written by Peter Landesman who also took the reigns in directing as well. Where the story suffers is in its lack of heart as while you are learning so much, learning what is done with hardly any feeling. Instead we get a monotone way of telling the story that doesn’t allow it to reach its deserved potential. And with something so big and world altering, you really need to go there. While the lack of feeling does hurt the film some , Neeson and the rest of the cast and the story itself is enough for this movie to be worth your time.
