Nixon

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 1996 by Christopher Sharrett

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RICHARD NIXON was adept at rejuvenating his image and keeping himself in the public eye, but he probably should have relaxed, since cinema and television have shown a steady fixation on keeping our 37th president within view, albeit from a rather unflattering perspective. During his years out of public life, a variety of fine actors (Rip Torn being the best Nixon incarnation to date) made Nixon somewhere next to Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman as a favorite political subject, and for many of the same reasons that his White House predecessors have been re-created in the media. Nixon is a way of understanding a half-century of American history that has come to represent, for some at least, a nation in decline.

With Nixon's death, there has been both renewed demonization and a surprising attempt to understand the forces that drove the man. The TNT cable network production "Kissinger and Nixon" is of the former camp, with Nixon (Beau Bridges in very heavy makeup) a venal, alcoholic anti-Semite, his regime depending on his Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger (Ron Silver, also unrecognizable--but very effective--in gobs of latex). "Kissinger and Nixon" is not really a Nixon movie; it is about his globe-trotting foreign policy whiz, and Nixon's name seems in the title mainly to capitalize on a Hollywood megafilm released within days of the television production.

Oliver Stone's "Nixon" is certainly not an attempt to rehabilitate the disgraced ex-president, but neither is it another try at having at him. This is the first film to take Nixon seriously, to try to understand what made him tick, to the point that the prerelease publicity for the film made much of the idea that the Nixon story is a tragedy of "Shakespearean proportion." The casting of Sir Anthony Hopkins in the lead underscores the point, but this is where the problems begin. As mightily as Hopkins struggles with the part, and as convincing as he is at times--there are moments when one can half-shut one's eyes and the actor is Nixon--the director asks his audience to make a very big leap. Hopkins looks nothing like Nixon and is too classy a figure to capture the man most of us recall as lowbrow, constricted, and utterly lacking any sense of self-worth. Still, the picture is compelling in its ambitions.

Film buffs will recognize "Citizen Kane" almost as soon as the movie's first scenes appear. Stone uses Orson Welles' classic as his key structuring device, as well as for his basic theme of a great man's rise and fall. Whereas Kane was sold into the bondage of wealth by his mother, Nixon, we are told, was emotionally deformed by a tyrannical Quaker mother who once told him that she could "see into thy very soul." The Protestant rigors of Nixon's origins in pre-Depression Whittier, Calif., are at the root of his paranoia. While the early deaths of two brothers allow Nixon's education and eventual public life, he never is permitted to forget this legacy and jettison the guilt imposed upon him.

Stone's production offers a Nixon who could not love or allow anyone to love him, including his stalwart, long-suffering wife Pat. In the film's portrayal of the final Watergate hours, Nixon's breakdown makes the point painfully obvious. The problem here is that Stone's psychobiography is a little too late. Anyone familiar with Nixon's record, from the Checkers speech to the angry farewell in 1962 to his real farewell to his staff following his 1974 resignation, knows that he was an insecure man alienated from the world of ordinary human interaction. Where Stone is more original is in his approach to the politics of the Age of Nixon.

The Nixon of Stone's vision is as much a victim as a participant in the power struggles of postwar America. An unruly and malevolent "system" is at issue here, so identified by a young war protestor during Nixon's famous rap session with students at the height of the Vietnam demonstrations. The student tells Nixon that he "probably couldn't end the war even if [he] wanted to," a point that Hopkins' expression tells us is acknowledged.

Critics of Stone will argue that his conspiratorial vision gets the better of him, and Stone's partisans will be skeptical of the Nixon reflective enough to rail against "Wall Street, the Mafia, big business." Stone suggests that Nixon knew something about the forces responsible for the John F. Kennedy assassination, but the director seems too wary of media criticism after "JFK" to spell out what he means. There are ominous meetings with J. Edgar Hoover and a grotesque Sunbelt tycoon, an amalgam of Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt, but these scenes serve more to enshroud the movie in a mist of apocalyptic gloom than define the "system" apparently responsible for Nixon's ruination.

The film poses Nixon as a central figure of postwar political life, but representative of its darker, more neurotic aspect. If JFK was the Golden Prince struck down by clandestine forces, Nixon is the Black Prince who finally usurped the throne. Stone's Nixon capitalizes on a fairly entrenched notion that Nixon was obsessed with the Kennedys' good looks and easy grace. He tried to minimize JFK by referring to him as a "matinee idol," but the film emphasizes Nixon's yearnings. In a scene before the downfall, Nixon stands in front of a White House portrait of Kennedy, whispering, "When they see you, they see what they want to be. When they see me, they see what they are" (a line Stone borrows from journalist Tom Wicker).