Nixon. - movie review

National Review, Feb 12, 1996 by John Simon

Compared to this, a film such as Oliver Stone's Nixon is very small, and not especially new, potatoes. Stone and his sundry writers and consultants cannot make up their minds about what to think of Nixon: conspirator or political wizard, flawed superman or inflated opportunist, marked by a hapless childhood or unlucky loser in Washington's intrigue derby? Object for pity, terror, or grudging admiration? This is not the same thing as creative ambiguity, where the filmmaker sees all sides of a man and presents him in the paradoxical but total round. Rather, it is a matter of vacillation, inconsistency, trying to have it too many ways -- not multivalent wisdom but shapelessly fuzzy thinking.

No one denies talent to Stone -- individual scenes or, more often, parts of scenes in this three-hour-plus film play effectively -- but you do not feel a ripe and judicious mind in control. Excess is like mother's milk to Stone. Better yet: like liquor to a drunkard; he could not lay off it even if he fully recognized its harmfulness, which is hardly the case.

There are further problems. A figure from the recent past, like Nixon, whom we all remember all too clearly, should be played by an actor resembling him. Anthony Hopkins, gifted as he is, does not remotely look like Nixon and, as a Brit, has far too palpably tough a time trying to sound like him; I found his "yeah"s -- or were they "ya"s? -- especially hard to take. E. G. Marshall, unconvincing as Mitchell, would have made a far better Nixon, looking more like him and able to suggest his particular brand of slippery unprepossessingness. Hopkins makes him beefy and bulldoggish, rather than oily and tricky -- almost Kissingerish in fact. But Marshall may have been too old, and not (horrible concept!) a star.

James Woods, a fine actor, lacks Haldeman's deceptively handsome, solidly all-American facade, and J. T. Walsh manages no characterization as Ehrlichman. David Hyde Pierce is a touch too morose for John Dean; Brad Pitt would have had the right pretty-boy quality, but the part must have been too small for him. Thus the excellent Ed Harris is wasted on Gordon Liddy. And though Paul Sorvino is the correctly bloated size, his Kissinger, visually and accentually as well as in general manner, is far less convincing than Ron Silver's was recently on television. David Paymer is properly sweaty-under-the-collar as Ron Ziegler, but best of all is the Pat Nixon of Joan Allen, a fine and restrained actress who manages fully to look the part to boot.

As usual, Stone is obsessed with Kennedy, who figures too prominently; and with conspiracies, both of the millionaire-Texan anti-JFK and, more plausibly, U.S. anti-Castro varieties, in the latter of which Nixon is made out to be strongly but indistinctly implicated. Vagueness proliferates; even Watergate is handled anticlimactically. I suppose there are legal reasons for much of this, but unless you can say what you want, why bother? The idea seems to be to make Nixon into some sort of tragic hero, a man of strength, determination, and genuine achievements, but undercut by his strict puritanical upbringing, his lack of charm especially vis-a-vis Kennedy, and his not having the right school tie and social background.

These minuses are meant to add up to the hamartia, the tragic flaw in Nixon's potentially heroic stature. To me, despite his foreign-policy accomplishments, Nixon always seemed to be a nontragic nonentity, and Kissinger, though clever, something rather worse. Maybe someday the full fishy story can be told, but even then I doubt if Oliver Stone would be the man for the job.

I had originally intended to review Twelve Monkeys, a well-received film of the kind formerly known as science fiction, but latterly as "futuristic," no doubt in order to make Marinetti and the Futurist painters revolve in their graves. An admitted co-optation of Chris Marker's La Jetee, which was both more original and shorter, this long and tedious movie concerns a man returned from the future to prevent a conspiracy and cataclysm that would wipe out most of mankind. As I watched it with growing revulsion (Terry Gilliam, the director, is as exasperating as he is talented), I could not decide which I loathed more: the parts I understood or those beyond comprehension. Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle, but not the uncle of 12.