Gaslit comes at the Watergate scandal sideways, focusing on the courageous efforts of Martha Mitchell—wife of President Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell—to publicly blame the commander-in-chief for the infamous break-in and ensuing cover-up. Martha’s outspokenness resulted in humiliation, abuse and ostracism, and Robbie Pickering’s Starz series (based on Leon Neyfakh’s podcast Slow Burn) would like to reconfigure this notorious historical saga as a case study in sexist marginalization. Too bad, then, that it lacks the focus, and perspective, necessary to make such a case, which might have been better achieved had the eight-installment affair (April 24) been conceived as a two-hour movie, minus all the diversions that turn it into an aimless slog.
Martha was already a nationally known figure when Nixon’s plumbers illegally infiltrated the Watergate Hotel, and as embodied by Julia Roberts, she’s a feisty Southern dame who doesn’t care about stepping on toes on her way into the spotlight. Roberts boasts Martha’s hair and attitude along with a star-wattage magnetism that her real-life counterpart did not, and that disconnect is one of many elements in Pickering and director Matt Ross’ series that undercuts its authenticity.
Opposite Roberts is Sean Penn in heavy facial prosthetics and makeup as Martha’s husband John, whom Martha loves despite the fact that he looks like a triple-chinned horror-movie monster in a suit (or tailed tuxedo), as well as comes across as repellant whether he’s being frisky with his spouse or not-so-subtly denigrating her celebrity-courting behavior. Penn loses himself in the role, but his John is an unctuous creep in every environment he inhabits—a significant problem considering that the proceedings are desperate to perform a tight-rope act in which John is a self-serving villain and yet simultaneously someone whom Martha might adore (and therefore be heartbroken over when he ultimately betrays her).
Roberts and Penn are Gaslit’s A-list headliners, if hardly its only focus. Pickering additionally lavishes attention on White House Counsel John Dean (Dan Stevens), a striver who wants to get in good with the president and, once the shit hits the fan with Watergate, works hard to avoid becoming a patsy. Dean is clumsily presented as both shady and sympathetic, and his professional travails are paired with his romantic escapades with Mo (Betty Gilpin), a flight attendant whom he meets via a dating service and eventually convinces to become his wife, this regardless of her initial impression of him as an off-putting me-first careerist. Dean’s persistence pays off with Mo, but thanks to herky-jerky plotting and hazy characterizations, one never fully comprehends why Mo decides to vigorously hitch herself to Dean’s wagon.
More troubling still, Gaslit avoids portraying Nixon himself on-camera—a rather glaring omission, given his principal role in this story—and thus never conveys Dean’s central culpability in the Watergate cover-up, or even his relationship with the president. Because the pair’s meetings always take place off-screen, it’s often unclear if Dean’s claims about his closeness to Nixon are overstated, imaginary, or valid (spoiler alert for non-history buffs: they were true). By sidelining Nixon in this fashion, Pickering’s tale feels like it has a hole at its core, and its various narratives consequently resonate as only tangentially tethered to the main plot.
Speaking of which, Gaslit also fixates on the Watergate operation’s ringleader G. Gordon Liddy (Shea Whigham), who’s envisioned as a Hitler-loving wackadoo true-believer with a psychotic dedication to completing his holy missions. Liddy was a crazy man who had much to do with the administration-destroying screw-up, but he had little direct connection to Martha, the material’s nominal protagonist, so the long stretches in which Pickering and Ross revel in his insanity play as time-padding passages. Whigham’s committed turn is intensely disturbing and largely superfluous, culminating with a seventh-episode sequence featuring the prison-bound Liddy fighting a rat in solitary confinement that’s so unrelated to the rest of the action that it may as well exist in a different series altogether.
The same can be said about virtually every scene involving Frank Wills (Patrick Walker), the Watergate Hotel security guard who first spotted the burglars’ presence in the building (courtesy of duct tape on a garage door), and later became a flash-in-the-pan celebrity before returning to his native Georgia. Hints of racism are sprinkled throughout Wills’ story, yet his belittlement doesn’t smoothly parallel Martha’s, since Pickering and Ross contend that he was merely a friendly if unexceptional guy who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Then again, by not clearly dramatizing whether Martha’s substance abuse was a problem that predated Watergate or was caused by it (and its fallout), the show never delineates how much of Martha’s victimhood was the result of her wretched husband, and how much of it was due to her own shortcomings. It’s a portrait shrouded in fog, which is something that similarly plagues the depictions of Dean and Wills.
Gaslit hovers around the edges of Watergate, fixating on human-interest asides (full of notable character actors in bit parts) that don’t impart much about the big picture. Martha’s well-publicized hotel-room kidnapping and testy domestic tribulations allow Roberts and Penn to engage in showy theatrics, and Dean and Mo’s ups and downs let Stevens and Gilpin do likewise. However, by not directly linking either Dean or John to Nixon (who’s treated like a ghost), the series articulates neither their actual guilt (and the depths of their gross self-preservation tactics), nor the scope of the crime itself. While viewing Nixon’s downfall through a unique angle is perfectly valid, Martha is far too shaky and peripheral an individual to provide such a fresh perspective, and the diffuse means by which Pickering and Ross relay their tale only exacerbates the sense that everyone can’t see the forest for the trees.
A feature film might have more successfully centered Martha as a lone voice of reason in the wilderness, destroyed for her honesty by domineering, sexist conservative men and the society they created. Gaslit is so scatterbrained, though, that it all too often loses sight of her.
