(Director’s Cut)
***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Joan Allen, Bob Hoskins, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Sorvino, Ed Harris, Larry Hagman, James Woods, David Paymer, and Powers Boothe.
Directed by Oliver Stone
1995
212 min R
Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” is rambling, episodic, confusing, and repetitive. But it is such an ambitious, fearless film, and God help me I love ambitious movies. I hate to keep harping on “Lord of the Rings” but, really, what ambition does it have other than being the largest video game ever, the biggest “Mission: Impossible 2” or “X-Men?” “LOTR” is so safe, even cowardly, and it is beloved by those who sniff and roll their eyes at the thought of movies trying to achieve anything lofty. Stone (director of “JFK,” “Platoon” “Wall Street,” and screenwriter for “Scarface”), on the other hand, is always, fearlessly trying to throw his arms around the world. He may not always succeed, but his attempts—which usually involve aggravating both the right and the left—are so much more astounding and envigorating than other people’s successes.
His “Nixon” is overflowing and bursting at the seams with ideas and characters. It’s not just politics and character drama, but it touches on history, marriage, morality, and personal loyalty. It is equal parts “Citizen Kane,” “JFK,” Greek tragedy, and “Shrek,” with a breathtaking performance by Welshman Anthony Hopkins (“Titus,” “The Silence of the Lambs”) as its centerpiece. A pox on those who bemoan its historical accuracy. Stone takes fewer liberties than Shakespeare does with his histories. It’s only our modern arrogance that claims Shakespeare didn’t know any better.
“Nixon” crosses “JFK’s” chronology-hopping unwrapping of a mystery with “Citizen Kane’s” chronology-hopping unwrapping of a man. While those movies have DA Jim Garrison and the faceless reporter Thompson, “Nixon” only has the great man himself. To emphasize his lonely estrangement, there is no one trying to get to the center of Richard Nixon except Richard Nixon. The movie twice mentions the Quaker practice (Dick was a Quaker) of finding the calm center. We first join Dick (Hopkins) alone in a dark room of the White House, listening to his famous tapes, fastforwarding and rewinding, fastforwarding and rewinding, and in a sense the movie never leaves that room.
And it is truly a dynamite performance by Anthony Hopkins. It is over the top and larger than life. A movie that requires so much compression and grand gestures requires a soaring, Macbeth-style lead. At 3 ½ hours I still felt like I missed a lot. Hopkins is a burlesque assembly of tics and twitches and searching eyes, and our feelings toward his Dick are as complex as the man himself. He is brilliant, but too brilliant to be the everyman he was trying to be to the people. He is too sweaty and too much like a car salesman to be a good public speaker, but he is also too morally weak to be president. He seems to always be saying whatever he can to please whoever is in the room with him. Dick is not a mastercriminal and there is no master plan. He’s just bumbling toward whatever he thinks is the best for the nation, using whatever means necessary, however criminal.
He bombs Cambodia, stretches out the war in Vietnam, accepts bribes for ambassadorships, and verges on becoming a fascist dictator. The phrase “you screw with us and your fucking head comes off” is addressed to his cabinet. But he also pulls the US out of Vietnam, negotiates successfully with both the Chinese and the Russians, and manages to appease both the Commie-haters and the hippies. Dick sees himself not as a harsh right-winger but as a Lincoln figure, trying to hold the country together. And all the while, he is hated, hated so vehemently, and he slouches and mopes in response. Stone lets Hopkins swear—a lot—and there’s casual besmirching of every president that went before him. JFK’s womanizing and bootlegger money are taken as a given and Ike’s mistress is mentioned. J. Edgar Hoover’s (Bob Hoskins) degeneracy rivals some of the weirdness we might remember about Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones in “JFK.” Not surprisingly, “Nixon” is dryly humorous in a dark, dark way. There’s a great, quick scene of Dick poring over the transcripts of his tapes while muttering “I sure say ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘goddammit’ a lot. We’ll have to fix that…oh, Jesus Christ.”
This is also a really hard movie. We are flooded with names and facts immediately and that pace never lets up. Just about everyone in “Nixon” answers to “John.” If you thought “JFK” was confusing, it holds our hand in comparison to what “Nixon” already expects us to know about Watergate. Add to that jumps through time and shifts between color and black-and-white and you might suspect that Stone’s direction is clouding things instead of clarifying, the way he did in “JFK.” But Stone knows that the movies are where we go for emotional truth, and not history. If he sacrifices historical clarity, it is so we can have a clearer view into Dick’s fractured mind, where he has lost track of how many plates he has spinning. “Nixon” shows us a man, not a history lesson. (“Nixon” overlaps “JFK” as well as “All the President’s Men”—how’s that for a triple feature? There are worse was to kill a day *cough* “Lord of the Rings” *cough.*)
On the DVD commentary, Stone laughs delightfully as he states “you never see movies like this—it’s just white men talking!” Dick is surrounded by various well-dressed advisors, including Kevin Dunn, Mamet-regular David Paymer, Fyvush Finkel, the late-great JT Walsh, and David Plimpton. Standouts include the always fabulous James Woods as Bob Haldeman, the human doberman, and a surprisingly effective turn by David Hyde Pierce of “Fraser” as a puppy-innocent John Dean. I could go on and on about all the great faces that pop up in this movie. But if I had to pick a favorite, it would be Paul Sorvino—who usually plays loud Italians, most famously in “Goodfellas”—as Henry Kissinger, quietly brilliant behind the glasses and perfectly modulating his voice.
Outside of the rooms full of white men, there’s Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, poor Pat, fed up with the thankless role of politician’s wife, especially when paired with the least gracious of all politicians. And let’s not forget the Watergate burglars: Ed Harris (“The Hours,” “The Abyss”) as Howard Hunt and John Diehl (director of “Red Rock West”) as Gordon Liddy. Mary Steenburgen plays Dick’s mom in flashback, “Young Indiana Jones” Corey Carrier is young Dick himself, and Tony Goldwyn is Dick’s brother. Like “JFK,” everyone and his mom is in this movie.
Page two of "Nixon." Back to home.