Nixon
Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring Anthony Hopkins
Reviewed by Russell Pink
Oliver Stone is not your average Hollywood "molestation and mayhem" director pursuing an easy Oscar. He an important, complex, if sometimes annoying creator of films about the heart of darkness he sees in US culture.
I heard much discussion for and against the obsession that led Stone to his controversial film JFK in 1993. It centres on the likely cover-up of information about conspiracies leading to Kennedy's murder by interests within the US political scene. JFK was, for many, an excessively padded film with some parody script, and a let-down after the commanding moral statements of earlier Stone movies on his favourite topic, the Vietnam War.
Somewhere in the latest film of Stone's '60s is the kernel of a better film than JFK. On the surface, to judge purely from Nixon's editing, the pace, visual richness and acting quality, little has changed since JFK. Stone demands that the big screen be big enough to carry both the weight of a full political narrative from 1945 to 1994, and an intense biographical portrait.
This may even make Nixon heavier going than its predecessor. But its ultimate edge of success may lie more in its human subject matter than in any of Stone's obvious talents at getting huge amounts of historical content across to the uninitiated, younger audience.
Richard Milhous Nixon, born 1913, died in 1994, prompting Stone immediately to assail his rehabilitation to elder diplomat status in the 1980s. Nixon, for me as a young university student, was a curious melange of colourless politico and arch-villain. The latter image came across more in 1973, as we watched him battle Congress and the press nightly on television.
Upon those crucial years of 1968 to 1974 in Washington, Stone sets his microscope: the Kissinger years and the Watergate period. From the start we learn that, whereas Kennedy was the liberal establishment darling, Nixon was its Satan, the one whom Democrats loved to hate and to use as JFK's foil.
The fact is that the larger-than-life JFK is largely derived from glamour articles between 1960 and 1963, and from William Manchester-style hagiographies soon after his death. JFK is so much a cultural construct, a cliche of post mortem political imagery, that few people have been bothered with truth until very recently.
Not so Richard Nixon. He provides an opportunity for biographers to get into a sombre mystery more exciting than the golden boy from Massachusetts. This is why Stone devotes much footage to the recreation of Nixon's poor childhood and youth in orange-grove California. The director is determined to convey why this man was both driven by hope of success and bound to be its victim once achieved.
I suspect the film is at odds with itself in that two-headed aim. In order to show Nixon's incapacities in the light of a penurious, rigid Christian upbringing, Stone needs the performance of Anthony Hopkins to display some vulnerability, inner turbulence and even pathos. But in order to get across the main idea — that an unstable scoundrel grabbed the White House — he needs to paint the devious side of Nixon over a 30-year career. Here Hopkins must be an armoured, cunning, determined figure.
It was a tall order, and the balance sought by the British actor deserves praise. However, political history contends with psychological biography in this film, and that will reduce its satisfaction for many.
Although Nixon must have appealed more than Kennedy and Johnson to a vast number of lower middle-class and "redneck" voters in the heartlands, he rarely saw that as his winning card. Nixon's ever-thwarted pursuit of the recognition for greatness accorded Lincoln and Kennedy depended on impressing the big boys: oil millionaires, shady entrepreneurs and even shadier fixers of slush-funds.
Therein lies a major aspect of this film. Stone subtly reinforces at all times the vision of political giants who are ethical dwarfs. He says to us, "This isn't just Nixon; this is American politics through and through".
Stone's Washington arena is a Roman one, a place where people are thrown to the lions of deceit and bribery on every corner.
Recalling an actual event, a tape-hoarding Nixon goes to the Lincoln Memorial to gaze at his hero's judgmental image. Here, in a scene that has layers of irony (was Lincoln so pure?), he meets disaffected students. The Kent State incident is just behind them. Blustering about why he has failed after three years to end the Vietnam horror, he is told by an insistent young woman that the reason is, he cannot; it is an untameable beast like the political machine itself, beyond even the president's control. Stagy perhaps, but useful in illustrating the chronic lack of insight Nixon seemed to have about the system he ran.
Stone believes Richard Nixon suffered from never admitting that political success at the highest levels goes hand in hand with profound compromise, which he feared would call retribution on him. And ironically, he created situations amenable to punishment. He was in the grip of unacknowledged childhood issues which made him a curious mixture of tough boss and a loose cannon emotionally.
Hence his infamous moods, in one of which he crassly orders Cambodia to be bombed no matter what the humanitarian or political consequences. Here is a glimpse of the madman with his finger on the nuclear trigger, who returned later in the shape of Reagan.
Nixon tries to do many things, and must fail at some. Hopkins' task was daunting, but is carried off with increasing conviction and realism as the film progresses. Yet in general, I found myself wishing for a more consistently unmoved political animal in the portrait. Stone lets his Nixon become maudlin in the 1973-74 crisis to a degree I cannot believe, even with all that Scotch.
Nixon is a ceaselessly unflattering film about the whole Washington scene, whether Democrat or Republican, and Stone's dudgeon brooks no softening. While the inner workings of the president who quits against his instinct fascinate Stone, the film maker is too ethically committed to feel remorse for giving an unsympathetic picture. He shows an equally unremorseful, shallow Nixon: a man who left the USA the more divided and cynical for his going.
Stone recognises the intimate links forged between capital and the oligarchic politics of Washington, but has not yet taken the final step of saying that it is from the uncaged economic beast in societies like the USA, that more and worse clones of a megalomaniac, faithless Nixon are spawned.
Nixon's funeral pomp and circumstance in front of four presidents was sorry testimony to the inability of that system to change of its own accord over the past 22 years since he smiled a pathetic farewell on the White House lawns. But the 1994 funeral was also Dick's last true victory wave over the will of the people.
As the band played "Hail to the thief"!