‘White House Plumbers’ Review: Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux in HBO’s Exhaustingly Hijinks-Heavy Watergate Comedy
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As a piece of history, the Watergate scandal is a daunting narrative smorgasbord.
There were too many characters in this madcap dramedy and they almost all beggar belief — one outlandish caricature after another — except that they’re all real. It’s a problem that Hollywood has solved by telling the Watergate story over and over again, with the spotlight on a different principal within the burgeoning fiasco each time. Maybe there are commonalities between Watergate recountings — the security guard removing the tape from an illicitly opened door has become the Murder of Bruce Wayne’s Parents of 20th century American history — but with an ever-changing prism, it should be possible to never come away with a repeated perspective.
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Maybe you have All the President’s Men on one, very serious, end of the spectrum and Dick on another, very silly, end of the spectrum and every other variation looking for tonal traction in between.
The struggle for tonal traction is the main challenge to HBO’s upcoming five-part series White House Plumbers, written by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck and directed by David Mandel. In turning this particular spotlight onto E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), Gregory and Huyck have given themselves possibly the toughest point-of-entry figures in this entire saga. In a story glutted with broad caricatures, Hunt and Liddy are maybe the broadest and perhaps the least inherently sympathetic.
In terms of aspiration, you can think of White House Plumbers as Hunt and Liddy’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two minor historical footnotes convinced they’re heroes. In terms of more practical execution, there’s evident difficulty in taking two figures generally depicted as supporting comic relief, somehow exaggerating their already exaggerated traits to make them comic leading men, and then making an abrupt detour into attempted seriousness that comes across as operatic pathos instead of humanizing.
White House Plumbers is a series of partially managed chaos, in which every actor in the impressive ensemble feels like they’re in a different show, and here’s the thing: The discordance is probably largely intentional and I’m confident it’s a valid interpretation of one way that Watergate probably felt from inside. It still makes for a frustrating and not wholly satisfying TV series.
The show presents Hunt and Liddy as a pair of very differently unfulfilled family men whose most committed relationship is with the Republican Party.
When he isn’t writing dreadful spy novels under a pseudonym, Hunt is stuck in a dead-end PR job after getting forced out of the CIA. He goes home to wife Dorothy (Lena Headey), who has a more decorated espionage past of her own, and an assortment of screwed up kids. An FBI wash-out, Liddy has a reputation for eccentricity and an unnervingly chipper, well-behaved family fronted by wife Fran (Judy Greer). The two men are brought together by Bud Krogh (Rich Sommer) and tasked with investigating the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
Hunt and Liddy fail upwards and soon their tasks include plugging other leaks — hence the cheeky “plumbers” job title — and, eventually, bugging the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building.
As “angles” go, approaching the Watergate break-in as the act of a group of disorganized buffoons is the least revelatory imaginable. White House Plumbers endeavors to humanize its perpetrators by illustrating that beneath their buffoonery was… lots and lots more buffoonery. The series starts with this imbecility already at maximum volume and then makes it louder and louder.
Hunt is a complicated buffoon. He’s motivated by a sense of economic inferiority, by a daughter with emotional problems, and by the fact that he may or may not have been involved in the Kennedy assassination. None of this makes him heroic, but you can at least identify several human things that drive him. Liddy is a hilarious buffoon. He talks with a wandering accent, blasts recordings of Hitler speeches for dinner guests and holds his hand over open flames to prove… something.
Put them together and they’re like two-thirds of the Stooges, especially when they head to Los Angeles in a series of ridiculous costumes and absurd wigs (no less realistic than the show’s general ’70s hair and makeup and costumes). It’s a funny treatment of these characters without being an insightful treatment.
None of this is appreciably different from the manic parade of crackpots and miscreants at the center of HBO’s Veep, training ground for Mandel, Gregory and Huyck. Maybe the critique is less provocative because of how familiar and well-established the facts are? Maybe the Beltway bedlam is more draining because of the decision to push the story to five hour-long episodes?
By the end of an hour, I was exhausted by the hijinks. By the end of two hours, having sat through extended reenactments of each failed Watergate break-in, I was looking for anything resembling a still center to this madcap universe. By the end of three hours, I’d identified Headey’s clear-eyed and capable Dorothy as the one character here worth rooting for — like a more deadly version of Martha Mitchell, the focus of Starz’s recent attempt to paint Watergate as a scandal fueled by buffoons. And by the end of the fourth episode I was actively angry with the glibly cheap laughs that accompanied Dorothy and her real-life fate.
Then suddenly, the fifth episode decides we’re supposed to take everything seriously. After four hours of wanting us to laugh at Liddy, the show is like, “You know he’s evil, right?” as if viewers were to blame for not fixating on the darkness earlier. After four hours of treating Hunt as a puffed-up blowhard, the show is like, “His hubris is heartbreaking,” as if viewers were responsible for him choosing country over family. It becomes a string of lectures about what this zany adventure actually meant for the country — “If all I’ve done is to undermine the average American’s faith in government, that will pay dividends for the Republican Party far into the future,” Liddy says with overwhelming obviousness.
I’m fully willing to accept White House Plumbers as an extended analogy to the January 6 insurrection, but it would be more palatable as a 90-minute telefilm. Trust me, folks, in 2071, nobody’s going to need a 5-hour attempt to lionize that shaman guy, either.
Harrelson’s performance is the one most in-line with the show’s varied excesses; whether the show wants to treat Hunt as a vainglorious fool or a tragic pawn, he’s at least committed to it, finding some levels on which Hunt is something other than silly. Theroux is the funnier of the two leads, mixing delirious line-readings with a physicality out of Tex Avery animation, but he’s less able to latch onto anything that might ground Liddy. As scene-stealing supporting performances, both would probably be Emmy-worthy. As protagonists, they had me seeking a release valve.
Headey comes closest as a repository of cutting deliveries and subtle eye-rolls in a series in which nothing else aspires to “subtle.” A pair of couples dinners with the Hunts and Liddys are the show’s best scenes because of how good Headey and Greer (underused but making the most of her character’s sunny disposition) are.
Mostly, though, the actors in the overqualified supporting cast come in, attempt to yell or flail or sputter exaggeratedly to keep up with the leads and then depart without justifying their performance. While I’d single out Kathleen Turner (wonderfully unrecognizable in a one-episode cameo), Zoe Levin, Domhnall Gleeson and Toby Huss as getting brief value out of their screen time, the list of actors being wasted completely includes Kiernan Shipka, Gary Cole, Corbin Bernsen, F. Murray Abraham, Yul Vazquez and David Krumholtz. It’s a great cast! It’s not a great use of it.
By the end of White House Plumbers, I’d begun to look forward, trying to figure out who the next Watergate series should be built around. The answer, if anybody is curious, is the small cadre of Cubans arrested in the break-in. Find a Cuban-American writer with an interest in understanding their story and find some angle better than “bumbling buffoons.” I’m all set there.
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