‘Gaslit’ review: Julia Roberts humanizes Watergate in new Starz series co-starring Sean Penn

Behind every great political scandal, there are players whose stories get shoved to the side by the first, second and even third drafts of history.

“Gaslit,” overpacked but compelling, shoves back — though not quite hard enough. The actors traverse a wide variety of styles, from sardonic satire to raw sincerity. While that stylistic range can feel indecisive in some episodes, it’s an awfully good cast.

With a deft balance of social cunning and justifiable paranoia, Julia Roberts takes the lead as “mouth of the south” Martha Mitchell. Her public statements regarding Richard Nixon’s ineptly corrupt administration helped bring down a presidential second-term hopeful and various minions intent on smearing the opposition party. Across the eight-part Starz series (seven episodes were available for preview), Roberts occasionally has to fight for screen time in what is an ensemble piece, not a star vehicle. Sean Penn plays her husband, Nixon crony and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, encased in a misjudged load of prosthetics. (More on that shortly.)

“Gaslit” devotes nearly equal time to White House counsel John Dean (Dan Stevens of “Downton Abbey”) and his wife, Maureen “Mo” Dean (Betty Gilpin). Gilpin excels as the series’ voice of reason and — as depicted here — the cool, clear, morally aghast rebuke to the feckless, reckless men, her husband included, making the wrong kind of history all around her.

The series opens with another major player: dirty-tricks maestro G. Gordon Liddy (Shea Whigham, a serious pleasure as always). We meet him doing Liddy’s infamous signature move: holding his hand over a candle flame, testing his tolerance for burning flesh, referenced though not shown in “All the President’s Men.”

History, Whigham’s Liddy tells us, “isn’t written by the feeble masses — the pissants, the commies, the queers and the women. It is written and rewritten by soldiers carrying the banner of kings.” By episode seven, in prison for the Watergate break-in, Liddy’s reduced to going mano-a-mano with a rat in a cell, though like so many co-conspirators, he enjoyed a lucrative career redemption outside politics, post-Watergate.

Other real-life figures take their share of the narrative here, fictionalized to varying degrees. (It’s a docudrama, or rather, a docu-comedy-drama, not a documentary.) Patrick Walker is heartbreaking as security guard Frank Wills, who first reported signs of a break-in at the Watergate complex, leading to arrests made early morning on July 17, 1972. Wills was treated as a marginalized pariah for doing his job. Though Martha Mitchell’s mistreatment at the hands of Nixon operatives centers the adaptation — she was, by various accounts and this show’s telling, imprisoned and drugged in an LA hotel suite for talking too much, too dangerously — “Gaslit” casts a sympathetic eye to various marginalized characters thrown under various buses.

Creator Robbie Pickering and his fellow writers, working under Matt Ross’s direction, do many things very well. The period is shrewdly evoked, braking right at the edge of parody. (As a former 12-year-old Watergate hearings viewer, I can attest to the general domestic onslaught of avocado green, harvest gold and simulated wood-paneled interiors.) When Roberts and Penn get a chance to really tear into each other as scene partners, the results are riveting. And the ensemble is full of wily scene-stealers, such as John Carroll Lynch as FBI director L. Patrick Gray, no one’s idea of a profile in courage.

“Gaslit” comes from the Watergate season of the Slate podcast “Slow Burn,” which began with a 25-minute episode on Martha Mitchell and fanned out from there. The Starz edition of the story strains a bit to find its focus, winding so many other figures around Mitchell.

There’s also a weird visual disconnect with Roberts, whose fine performance is relatively unconcerned with re-creating the Martha Mitchell we know from archival material, up against a nearly unrecognizable Penn as John Mitchell. His jowly prosthetics, to be sure, are first-rate: Kazuhiro Tsuji, who won an Oscar for turning Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour,” achieves a similarly convincing effect for Penn. Yet is the performance and the series truly better for it? Is Mitchell’s face Churchill-level iconic? (No.) Why go to the trouble? Even with Penn in the role, would it have been possible to go halfway with this sort of facial sculpting job, and let an actor of Penn’s skill level do more of the work?

“Gaslit” owes its brash comic edge to the political work of Adam McKay (”Vice,” “Don’t Look Up”), an edge that has its payoffs and its limitations. With the Watergate character roster, it’s hard to avoid comedy, because they delivered so many varieties: the comedy of self-delusion (John Dean), the comedy of straight-faced insanity (Liddy), the comedy of office politics (everyone else). In “Gaslit,” it’s hard to take Dean seriously; he’s a hapless hollow man in Stevens’ portrayal, and you have to squint, hard, to see what brought the Deans together. It’s like the makeup issue with Penn vs. Roberts, only without the makeup; while Stevens plays almost every line for nervous laughs, Gilpin makes Mo a little bit of everything: funny, melancholy, regretful, defiant.

Films such as “Vice” and series such as this one, cannot help but point to the inevitable Trump White House projects. How will our previous president’s (first?) term in office be treated on screen? For McKay-style laughs only? When Nixon’s worst has been so easily bested by recent history, is it possible we already living in a time when satire becomes not simply limiting, but irresponsible?

On the other hand: It remains a singular historical fact that G. Gordon Liddy was not, in fact, a fictional character. And when an actor as good as Whigham gets lines such as “I don’t experience human neuroses,” “Gaslit” can be forgiven its flaws.

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‘Gaslit’ — 3 stars (out of 4)

Content rating: TV-MA

Running time: Eight episodes, approximately eight hours. Seven episodes were screened for review.

How to watch: Now streaming on Starz.

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