Just after sunset, the writer-director Peter Landesman sat on a bench in Battery Park, staring at a sombre sculpture. The American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, a bronze statue on a breakwater near the butt of Manhattan, commemorates the torpedoing of a merchant-marine vessel in the Second World War: three men are in a sinking boat and another man, already overboard, is desperately reaching up.
“When the tide is low, it looks like they’re being saved,” Landesman said, “and when it’s high and it covers the guy in the water it’s, like, They’re all anonymous and they’re all going to die.” Buzz-cut, grizzled, and deeply tan, he wore black jeans and a rawhide bracelet. At fifty-two, he now lives in Los Angeles. In his thirties, when he was a painter and a conflict-zone journalist, he lived in Sheridan Square, and he would regularly jog down to the memorial. “There was nothing more morose than coming here at high tide in the rain.”
Landesman’s new film, “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” works in that forlorn vein. The film stars Liam Neeson as the ceaselessly aggrieved Felt, the former associate director of the F.B.I. who revealed in 2005 that he’d been Deep Throat, the source who helped guide Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate. Full of silky guys in boxy suits sparring for advantage, it’s also rife with betrayals and acts of moral desperation. A leaker is not without honor, save in his own agency.
“The F.B.I. hates Felt to this day,” Landesman said. “The narrative is that he did it because he was pissed off at being passed over for Pat Gray”—whom Nixon appointed to run the Bureau in 1972, after J. Edgar Hoover died. A recent piece on Politico makes a strong case that Felt leaked not to get rid of Nixon but to get rid of Gray, so he could become director himself. “And, yeah, he was pissed off. But he betrayed the F.B.I. to save the F.B.I.” When Landesman began writing the film, in 2006, he recalled, “I’d just gone through this terrible controversy”—an article he wrote about sex trafficking was called hyperbolic and thinly sourced—“and the bigger the truth I told the worse it got. So it was very Feltian, and I understood why he stayed in the shadows.”
He noted that the parallels to the present moment—a rogue President putting government officials to the test—were “supernatural,” though accidental. “Jim Comey did what he did without any thought of the consequences for him personally, just like Felt,” he added. “To me, heroism is visible,” he said, “and sacrifice and martyrdom, which are invisible, are much more interesting. They’re what my body of work is all about.” Landesman’s previous film, “Concussion,” starred Will Smith as the doctor who took on the N.F.L., proving that playing football can ruin your brain. “I’m that guy,” he continued. “No studio would have confidence in me if I proposed a romantic comedy with Ben Stiller and Meg Ryan.”
That afternoon, Landesman had screened the film for Woodward and Bernstein. “I went out of my way not to watch ‘All the President’s Men’ when I was making this, and, with my lenses, my aspect ratio, my bluish filter, I tried to create a look that was not ‘President’s Men.’ ” He went on, “They had bones to pick, but, over all, they loved it. Bob said it was very successful in delivering a complex portrait of a man who was a lot of shades of gray. Felt was selfless, but his rationale was also very wrapped up in his toxic marriage and the missing daughter he was afraid was in the Weather Underground.” (Felt had F.B.I. agents break into the homes of associates of the militant group, and was later convicted of civil-rights violations.)
In the film, Felt’s wife, Audrey (Diane Lane), is combustible but beguiling. Landesman noted, though, that “Audrey was a terrible alcoholic, and in an earlier draft I leaned more into the ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ aspect. Felt told me—before he lost his memory—that while he’d gotten the police to say she died of cardiac arrest, she actually ended things by putting a bullet into her head.”
He considered the memorial awhile; the tide was rising. “It’s so fucking lonely,” he said. “My greatest fear is dying like that, and just being a bubble on the surface of the water.” Twenty minutes later, after parting with his visitor, Landesman texted a photo of the statue. The tide was high and the shadows long, but the lights of the harbor blazed behind it. “In case u forget,” he wrote. ♦
