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★★★★
White House Plumbers is not, as it sounds, a comedy about the people plugging the pipes at the White House. Though the title is only a whisker off. The biggest clue that this is about something bigger comes in the opening frame: “The following is based on a true story,” it says. “No names have been changed to protect the innocent because nearly everyone was found guilty.”
Veep showrunner David Mandel has turned Egil Krogh and Matthew Krogh’s 2007 book Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House into a political satire dunked deeply in a caper movie.
Justin Theroux as G. Gordon Liddy, Judy Greer as his wife Frances, Lena Headey as Dorothy Hunt and Woody Harrelson as E. Howard Hunt in White House Plumbers.Credit: HBO
It’s jaunty, mischievous and at times hilarious. It’s also a big chunky piece of American political history: a snapshot of how Richard Nixon’s political machine set out to silence dissent but ultimately dismantled an American presidency.
Egil “Bud” Krogh’s book is the story of his experiences in the White House, specifically as head of the SIU, a Special Investigations Unit which earned the nickname “The Plumbers”. Their purpose was just as the name suggested: to repair the Nixon White House’s leaking pipes.
Ultimately, the book is less a blow-by-blow account of life behind the closed doors of one of America’s most infamous presidencies, and more a treatise on the ethical challenges of leadership. What Krogh was prepared to do to protect Nixon’s presidency likely surprised everyone. It certainly surprised Krogh himself.
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The television adaptation zeroes in on two of the department’s most colourful figures, E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux). The series also stars Domhnall Gleeson as White House counsel John Dean, Lena Headey as Hunt’s wife Dorothy, Gary Cole as FBI czar Mark Felt and F. Murray Abraham as Judge John Sirica.
Written by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, and directed by Mandel, White House Plumbers sets itself apart by immediately tearing up the political drama playbook. This feels like a caper movie, a sort of almost-very-serious romp that dances in that space between laughing at the absurdity of what you’re seeing, and quietly realising it’s almost completely faithful to the historical account.