opinion | So far this year, our editor Michael Hille has laughed out louder times at “The White House Plumbers” – and the HBO production is based not on the imagination of screenwriters, but on reality.
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Biographical stories rarely invite laughter. As soon as the label “Based on real events” is on a film or series, it is almost always a drama. In Hollywood, reality is usually accorded a certain degree of seriousness. For the new HBO series “White House Plumbers”which in Germany at WOW started, this does not apply to any second: The series exposes its real protagonists mercilessly and without mincing their mouths – And for a good reason. It’s about the weird duo G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who in 1972 did nothing less than shake the foundations of US democracy. Anyone familiar with US history knows the importance of the two gentlemen: they were the ones who once headed a special unit called “plumbers” in the White House and illegally broke into the Watergate building for President Richard Nixon to conduct the political Intercept opponents with bugs.
When this blew up, it led to biggest scandal in US politics to date and the only time to date that a president has had to resign. The Watergate affair has often been told and made into a legendary film with “The Untouchables” from the perspective of the courageous journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who uncovered the burglary and made it public. But “White House Plumbers” explains how Liddy and Hunt could ever be exposed with their burglary. The reason: it was about arguably the most amateurish bangers Nixon could ever have commissioned.
Watergate again? Why “White House Plumbers” is still new
HBO / Sky Germany
The 70s suit them: Justin Theroux and Woody Harrelson in “White House Plumbers”.
“Do we really need another Watergate film adaptation?”, some will have thought when the series was announced. Watergate was an event of such political explosiveness that it was frequently adapted into Hollywood. The scandal is mostly told as an underdog story. The aforementioned classic “The Untouchables” shows the fight of two journalists against the most powerful man in the world, in the satirical “I Love Dick” two 15-year-old teen girls are responsible for uncovering the scandal and the masterful “Frost/Nixon” told how the small and rather ridiculed TV presenter David Frost elicited a quasi-confession from the President in an interview three years after Nixon’s resignation.
Almost always, when Watergate was filmed, this scandal was reinterpreted as the heroic story of “the little man”. One can view most Watergate adaptations as therapeutic cinema for a battered nation, who doubted her own values more than ever because of the affair. “White House Plumbers” turns the tables more than 50 years after the Watergate burglary: Screenwriter Alex Gregory and director David Mandel present Liddy and Hunt as cartoonish idiots who are just as popular in infantile comedies as “Dumb and Dumber” or “Police Academy ” could occur. This creates a completely new view of Watergate: After watching the five almost hour-long episodes, one gets the impression that Watergate didn’t need to be revealed at all, that the heroes known from the cinema weren’t needed at all. The President and his henchmen only stumbled over their own stupidity.
Sensationally funny: “White House Plumbers” impresses with great actors
HBO / Sky Germany
They overthrew a president through amateurish mistakes: one can only laugh about the “White House Plumbers”.
It’s such a joy to watch “White House Plumbers” with a punchy slapstick overdose showing off these morons. Woody Harrelson (“True Detective”), after all an established character actor, plays E. Howard Hunt as an excessively self-righteous ex-CIA man who talks in the most stupid way on a tour about wanting to save the West, which is threatened by feminists and hippies become. His partner G. Gordon Liddy becomes even more of a laughing stock thanks to the skillful play of Justin Theroux (“The Leftovers”): not only does he have a gigantic ego despite acute incompetence, but he also has an unnerving fascination with Adolf Hitler (this is even historical guaranteed) and lives it out in a bizarre way – at dinner, for example, he puts on a record that contains a “best-of” of the worst speeches Hitler ever gave.
No question: In a brightly colored look, which is more reminiscent of light-hearted material like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, a comedy about super idiots is presented here, who somewhere between stupid right-wing extremist attitudes, sexist old man humor and midlife crisis just because of their stupidity Trying to undermine US democracy. They tried four times to break into the Watergate complex and plant listening devices, and they did it as clumsily as they could. “White House Plumbers” is as wide-legged as the two and their team of no less silly men act refreshingly biting satire on what is now called “boomerism”.. Not surprisingly, the wives of the two are often the characters that are most likely to arouse sympathy: Fran Liddy, played wonderfully by Judy Greer (“Halloween Kills”), can really feel sorry for her innocent naivety while “Game of Thrones” beast Lena Headey at her best as Dorothy Hunt regularly despairs of the mischief her husband spouts.
“White House Plumbers” is red hot despite Watergate
HBO
The shocking revelation of White House Plumbers: Such weaklings as G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt could achieve careers in the service of the White House.
And yet some will remain with the question: “Do we really need another Watergate film adaptation?” It only gradually becomes clear what “White House Plumbers” really aims for. When Liddy and Hunt take their jobs with the Republicans, Nixon’s aide John Dean (played not entirely coincidentally by Domhnall Gleeson, most recently seen as the ridiculously acting ‘Star Wars’ villain) briefs them both, saying, “Your duties is espionage, sabotage, disinformation, infiltration and surveillance: So all the shit we do before every election.” When Watergate was later blown and Dean was to become one of the scapegoats, he switched sides and became the main witness to the scandal. In these moments it becomes clear that “White House Plumbers” is set in the 70s and shows the “Watergate” actors, but in fact speaks of contemporary America – and of Donald Trumpa much more recent ex-president who is also currently on trial.
You can’t help but with all of this bumbling political amateurism the Nixon administration to think again and again how comparatively harmless and ridiculous the Watergate scandal seems in the light of the past years of US politics. From a political perspective, it’s easy to laugh at the rude and stupid men and their views who brought down a president through their unprofessionalism. Simultaneously the series exposes men like Liddy and Hunt as the root cause of what is now an extremely divided nation, in which shocking incidents such as the 2021 storming of the Capitol in Washington are possible. In male-dominated systems of rule, the dumbest of the dumb can appear as infantile as they want – and even if they fail, they can still change the world.
A final text overlay draws attention to how lax the punishment for the “plumbers” of the White House was in the end: G. Gordon Liddy only sat in prison for a meager four and a half years before he was released on parole, and later appeared in two episodes, among other things seen in the TV series “Miami Vice”. A historical fact – as is the fact that Liddy was, of course, hired as a political commentator on Fox News television for years.
It is precisely when such facts are mentioned that the laughter gets stuck in the throat with “White House Plumbers”, probably the funniest series of 2023.
“White House Plumbers” started on May 2nd, 2023 in Germany at WOW. A new episode appears there every Tuesday.
