If Robert McNamara’s recently published apologia for the war in Vietnam struck you as well-reasoned and compassionate, then you’re likely to find yourself also in the mood for Oliver Stone’s new bio-pic Nixon. Overall, the movie is the most sympathetic portrait of the publicly disgraced president we’re likely to observe since the collective amnesia we, as a nation, experienced while listening to the eulogies following his death last year. Certainly it is time for us to put some demons of the past to rest, and Stone’s movie seems an honest attempt to do just that. His Nixon wants to make sense of the politician and his actions, and covers a lot of ground in that quest. It’s as if Stone were looking for Nixon’s “Rosebud,” the key that might unlock all the forgotten secrets. What Stone delivers is a psychological portrait that exposes aspects of the former president not widely considered in the past. Stone’s Nixon is a man resentful of the East Coast social elite and the Ivy Leaguers (especially the Kennedys), a man whose internalization of the stern value system of his Quaker parents dogged him throughout his life, a man who was haunted by the idea that the deaths of his two brothers and the deaths of the Kennedys caused him personal gain. This Nixon is a man with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. “Can you imagine what he might have become,” comments this dramatized Kissinger (Sorvino), “if only someone had really loved him?” Such psychoanalytic theorizing opens up a character in a narrative sense, yet I’m not sure that it adds much to our political understanding of the figure. Nixon is a self-consciously epic story that views its subject as a great tragic figure. Stone uses the word “Shakespearean” to describe his drama; the Greek concept of “hubris” also fits with Stone’s narrative approach. What eludes me is how a better understanding of Nixon’s human tragedy can contribute to our understanding of his “incursions” into Laos and Cambodia, his contempt for the courts in the Watergate debacle, his actions that earned him the moniker “Tricky Dick,” and so forth. We come away with greater compassion for the human being, but I don’t think increased empathy can ameliorate the consequences of his infamous actions. Though his physical features bear little resemblance to Nixon’s, there could not be a more serendipitous choice than Hopkins to play Nixon. Hopkins captures the mannerisms and speech patterns ably enough, while his allure as a great British actor amplifies the Shakespearean angle of the story at the same time his notoriety for portraying Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter proves him capable of rendering the most reprehensible of human beings likable. In the three hours it takes Nixon to run its course, the movie feels like it only provides a swift glimpse of a portion of the man’s life. It all takes place during the waning days of Nixon’s presidency in a White House populated by conspiratorial underlings. Flashbacks to Nixon’s youth, his rise to power, and his survey of his accomplishments are interspersed with all kinds of surreal visual effects to indicate the passage of time and history. In the end, we are left with the now-familiar image of Nixon on his knees praying in the Oval Office. For all its unwieldy temporal scope and narrowness of perspective, Nixon is an amazingly graceful beast, flawed yet invigorating, packed with enough material that will fascinate and irk moviegoers of all stripes for quite a time to come.
This article appears in 2005.
