Gaslit presents the twin core arcs of Martha Mitchell and John Dean. Martha struggles to keep her high public profile functional, her own dysfunctions stable and her family integral against the threats from the plotting. The young John Dean stumbles with a shaky grip on the ladder of ambition as his haste and tunnel vision erode any safety to his distance. That barely scratches the surface but this is a historical drama and the details can be filled in with a little Googling.
Julia Roberts shines as Martha Mitchell, a ruling class lush with all the sass of her dirt humble start, bringing a convincing brittleness out from the strength that brought her to the top of her society. From intimidatingly forthright to a bizarre surrendered intoxication, while we can clearly see the signature beauty of the movie star she gives us so much solid character that we forget. The reverse is true of Sean Penn as her husband. He is buried in such undulating prosthetics that you won't recognise him and will need reminders throughout. His performance, while not as striking as Roberts' (though she is more richly written) is impressively physical and gravity-generating.
Dan Stevens gives us a compelling mix of ambition and clumsiness as John Dean. Young, beautiful and ostentatious, he is proud of his gold Porsche and seems to have strode proudly out of a What Kind of Man Reads Playboy ad. When Mo, his eventual wife, steals an exploration of his den she finds a kind of waxwork recreation of the mind of an upwardly mobile conservative. A neon sign blares FUCK COMMUNISM from one wall. Medals for places in spelling bees are displayed as a testimony to persistent, high-functioning mediocrity. The wall of empty beer cans say the same about his tertiary education. The way Stevens brings this into character is a studiously uneven delivery of lines that are often repeated with slight differences but not in the way that a silvertongue might redraft on the fly as much as someone who wonders if he said it right to begin with. At other times he eases into a confidence that he shares with too few. In one scene this balloons as he jokes gently with the malcontent daughter of Martha Mitchell who is hiding in the closet with a cigarette while Mo, looks on unobserved a few doorframes away. Best of all, Dean as a character does not reconcile and consolidate, he's as nebulously formed at the end as he was at the beginning, facing each new challenge with the same struggle with doubt.
But if he is a socio-political Salieri without a Mozart, G. Gordon Liddy is less of a Wagner than a Wagner fan. Shea Whigham is having a ball playing the intense Liddy. It is in this larger than life character that the series' writing most closely approaches satire as Liddy's own self-avowed extremity of expression and action must be portrayed believably. He is someone so deeply buried under his own self image that even his moments of vulnerability feel like performance. He is someone who never makes exits or entrances but has the sense that he takes the stage with him. Even here, I have strayed a little from describing a character and a performance in favour of describing the person, so I went to YouTube and sampled interviews from different decades and found an almost disappointingly lucid and even handed raconteur. Back in the series Whigham's bravura characterisation is built on the need for a central force whose precarious self-control engenders stress and dread in his audience. With his concentrated stare and machismo the actor gives us a kind of Dadaist Dabney Coleman: not quite the person on the talk show chair but, in line with the title of the series, somewhere between that and the thing driven in the real world. Whigham is a character actor but this performance lifts him from dependability to career best, however strange his vehicle.
While performance and strong writing keep this series afloat the vehicle for those, the cinematic presentation, provides a casing that is not without its issues. First, it looks like the kind of boardroom paranoia movies that the likes of Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula made at the time (including the Watergate-based procedural All the President's Men) There is a clear attempt at giving the look and feel a brown suede tint with visible film grain and many sexily overstated angles in establishing shots. The good side of this is that the story feels like the era in which it happened. The bad side is that in keeping things so apparently authentic means that it is easy to keep the events and concerns in the time capsule as though they can be bottled as curios. While Nixon himself is kept mostly to real news footage of the time and a physical portrayal given in slices of body and facial features like an archival examination as he sits in the shadowy gloom of the Presidential bedroom and delivers a prolonged reedy fart in sight of the Washington Monument through the window.
To its credit the series holds back on sourced music to do its work, allowing only a few hits 'n' memories in for poignant use, usually at the end of episodes so their imposition is reduced to function rather than style. This allows for the commissioned score to thrive and do its work and even then it is subtle. Other pleasantly missed opportunities attest to restrain like indoor smoking or daytime drinking. The fashions are on high show but they would be, given the characters' place in the public eye. When similar things were displayed in Mad Men the exaggeration fit due to the demi-monde of advertising and a very self-conscious promotion of the era. There needs to be something of sixties lingering in Gaslit and it's there, weary and fading, ready and vulnerable for the attack that the scandal and its fallout will make on it and give the seventies its own grit and cynicism.
I felt like more after the series was over but instead of turning to Pakula's All the President's Men, I went to his earlier post-Watergate paranoia piece The Parallax View. This political thriller for the ages takes its initial cue from the assassinations of the sixties and adds the mood of Watergate to the brew of an America tired of hope and bravado, happy enough to leave the worst of its workings to an increasingly distrusted government. A product of New Hollywood, the rising work of previously independent film auteurs who broke through in the seventies like Coppola's Godfather films, Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Lumet (a veteran of television boardroom culture) and his masterpiece Network, Pakula's film today looks like it's aware of how seventies it is with its cinematography of darkened offices, studiously casual swearing and the studiously casual entrance of its star (the insanely bankable Warren Beatty) in the opening scenes. It has a highly effective orchestral score in which a solemn patriotic sounding series of cadences are interrupted by the plinking piano of a mystery movie. There is a sequence in which Beatty's character is subjected to a bizarre slideshow as his emotional responses are recorded electronically. There is no way most people can view this slideshow without being heavily affected but the suggestion is that the assassin recruiters are looking for people who don't react at all. The rest of the film is as chilling. I couldn't have chosen better. It felt like a companion episode.
To me Watergate happened in the pages of Newsweek and MAD magazine. It made its way into sketch comedy and radio patter. My nostalgia for the time is through these media, grimy photographic or expertly inked. America seemed to me to be where grown up life had been designed and exported. America was the space program that awed me and the figure in the car I think I saw when Dad hoisted me to his shoulders to see Lyndon Johnson pass by after visiting Townsville air base. But there was something else. It was a mood but an assumed one. I can recall understanding, however primitively, that I accepted it when we watched Dr Strangelove as a family and laughed along at the dark cynicism on show. It seemed wise to be arch and laugh at grave things. While that made me feel grown up, like an American, it also felt like something I wanted to resist while I was still a kid and do things for the hell of it. That this tv show switched all of that on again, albeit momentarily, and felt powerful. I'm still unsure whether that was the show or just the triggered recollection but for now I'll happily mix them up.
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