The Stars Are Bright in "Gaslit"

If there's any sign that there's no difference between movie and television stars anymore, it's that Julia Roberts and Sean Penn headlined a limited series about the Watergate scandal for Hulu, and it was not a big deal.  "Gaslit" stars Penn and Roberts as John N. Mitchell, former attorney general and the chair of Nixon's reelection campaign, and Mitchell's strong-willed wife Martha.  We also follow John Dean (Dan Stevens), a Nixon administration lawyer who becomes a witness against the president, his girlfriend Mo (Betty Gilpin), and Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Libby (Shea Whigham).  A very long list of interesting character actors are also in the mix as various reporters, law enforcement, and governmental figures.

As someone too young to have been around for the scandal, it was fun to get a play-by-play of the Watergate break-ins, the cover-up, and the subsequent hearings.  While I know the broad outlines of the events, it was good to learn some of the smaller stories about the people who have fallen through the cracks over the years.  We meet Frank Wills (Patrick Walker), the security guard who stumbled across the break-in and wound up revealing the whole plot.  I liked the occasional check-ins with FBI agents Magallanes (Carlos Valdes) and Lano (Chris Messina), who are a pair of wry working stiffs not sure that they're doing much good trying to investigate Nixon's allies.  However, Roberts is clearly the star as Martha, who was a minor celebrity in her day, both celebrated and reviled for telling the truth about what her husband and his colleagues got up to.    

This is a series best enjoyed for its performances.  While "Gaslit" does a good job of showing the seedy political culture that made the scandal possible, it's far more interested in studying the characters it's chosen to single out - the unreliable, unstable Martha, her reluctant husband, the weaselly John Dean, and finally the insane G. Gordon Liddy.  They're all reprehensible people to varying degrees, but in "Gaslit" they're allowed to be very human and occasionally sympathetic.  Roberts has no trouble selling Martha's buzzy socialite, or the troubled woman she is underneath.  Sean Penn, in a fat suit and layers of facial appliances, is unrecognizable but still very effective as Mitchell.  However, Shea Whigham handily steals every scene he is in as Liddy, who he plays as a self-aggrandizing lunatic barely maintaining a guise of sanity.  Whigham is one of those character actors who has been in everything, and with this role I hope he finally breaks out and achieves greater prominence.      

I liked the miniseries overall, but it felt too much like awards bait in a season that has been full of similar prestige projects.  I kept thinking about the last Watergate project I had seen, Spielberg's "The Post," about the news coverage of the scandal.  The two projects are very dissimilar in tone - "Gaslit" is more venal and earthy, with a touch of Southern Gothic.  However, both share a major flaw in that they are both operating in the absence of Richard Nixon, whose shadow may loom large over the events, but he isn't actually a character in either story.  This leaves a vacuum where a much stronger villain ought to be.  In "Gaslit," the Mitchells, John Dean, and Liddy all intersect but barely seem to affect one another.  Giving all of them a common enemy to tie the series together would have been a big help.

I can't help wondering what "Gaslit" would have looked like as a prestige picture with the same cast.  I imagine it would have probably jettisoned most of John Dean's storyline and some of the more minor characters, which would have been a shame.  However, keeping the focus on the Mitchells would have probably made for a tighter and more focused, more effective piece of media.  As with an awful lot of recent miniseries, more is not always better.  At eight episodes, "Gaslit" isn't too egregious about its extra screen time, but it is harder to track various characters' arcs and relationships as they're spread out over more episodes.  

With a topic as complicated and many-faceted as Watergate, there's necessarily a lot of time spent on covering many different angles.  However, I was disappointed to find that there's relatively little time spent on the actual gaslighting of Martha Mitchell, and the other storylines often served to distract from her plight. 

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