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Anthony Hopkins triumphs as Nixon in Oliver Stone's surprisingly sympathetic biopic |
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Richard Nixon), Joan Allen (Pat
Nixon), James Woods (HR Haldeman), Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig), Larry Hagman
(“Jack Jones”), Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt), Dan Hedaya (Trini Cardoza), Bob
Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover), Madeline Kahn (Martha Mitchell), EG Marshall (John
Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler), David Hyde Pierce (John Dean), Paul
Sorvino (Henry Kissinger), Mary Steenburgen (Hannah Nixon), JT Walsh (John Ehrlichman),
Sam Waterston (Richard Helms), Brian Bedford (Clyde Tolson), Tom Bower (Francis
Nixon), Kevin Dunn (Charles Colson), Annabeth Gish (Julie Nuxon), Tom Goldwyn
(Harold Nixon), Saul Rubinek (Herbert G Klein)
In 1995, there was one person the chronicler of the 1970s American
experience, Oliver Stone, hadn’t covered: Richard M Nixon. The man who was the
embodiment of the dark scar on the American consciousness, the grim, unlovable
presence behind the war in Vietnam, the protests and the deep, never-ending
wound of Watergate, that seemed to drag the country further and further into
the abyss of self-disgust. The man who besmirched the office he had been chosen
for, the least popular president ever, the national shame. With Stone’s searing
attacks on everything from Vietnam policy to the conspiracies behind the
Kennedy assassination, you’d expect his film on Nixon to be a condemnation.
What people didn’t expect was a film as strikingly even-handed as this, which
recasts Nixon not as a gloating villain, but a Shakespearean figure, a Greek tragedy
of a man destroyed by chronic character flaws.
Opening with a crushed Nixon listening to his precious tapes
in the bowels of the White House in his final days in office, like a drunken
Gollum, the film is told in a fascinatingly non-linear style – loosely falling
into two acts, cutting back and forwards in time. The first act covers most of
Nixon’s career up to his winning the presidency, focusing on his Quaker
childhood and the influence of his mother Hannah (Mary Steenburgen), his defeat
in the 1960 election to Kennedy and his years rebuilding his political
standing. The second half follows a more linear approach, covering the Nixon
Presidency that becomes increasingly bogged down in the inept cover-up of
Watergate and the increasingly desperate attempts to save his presidency,
intermixed with his triumphs in foreign policy.
What is really striking is that Stone’s movie finds a great
deal of sympathy for this troubled and complex man. He’s a man who has
greatness in his grasp, dedicated, intelligent and with vision – but fatally
undermined by his self-loathing, self-pity and his bubbling resentment that he
does not have the love of the people. Like Lear raging against the storm, or
Macbeth bemoaning the impact of his vile deeds, Stone’s Nixon becomes a
sympathetic figure, even while the film makes no apologies for his crimes, his
aggressive bombing of Cambodia (the film notes at its end the bombing led
directly to the massacres of the Khmer Rouge) or his failures to claim any
responsibility for how his own actions led to his end.
Stone’s empathetic vision of Nixon is shaped hugely by
Anthony Hopkins’ titanic performance in the lead role. Hopkins makes no real
effort – beyond teeth and hair – to look like Nixon, but brilliantly embodies
Nixon’s awkward physicality and, above all, his angry, bitter, resentful
personality. It’s not an imitation, but it totally captures him. Hopkins has
got it, and the disintegration of Nixon over the course of the film into the
shambling, miserable, twitching, even slightly unhinged mess he became in the
final days of his presidency is astounding.
It works because Hopkins never loses sense of the potential for greatness in Nixon – sure
he’s awkward (Hopkins superbly captures Nixon’s awkward grin, his stumbling
nervousness in conversation), but he’s also assured, confident and clearly
carries huge insight into realpolitik.
His flaw is that he wants to be both the master politician and the people’s champ, to be both Nixon and JFK, to have the people cheer him to the rafters. It’s a longing
that turns to resentment, that fuels insecurity and fear, that causes him to
cheat and steal, to play the game, to be so afraid of being cheated that he
cheats more and cheats bigger.
It’s that potential for greatness that swims through all of
Stone’s masterfully made, electric film. Stone’s love for mixing film stock,
fake newsreel footage, snazzy camerawork, switching colour stock, stylistically
eclectic sound and music choices and bombastic lecturing comes to the fore here
– and I accept it won’t be for everyone. But for me it works. It’s a big,
dramatic movie because it covers an epic theme. From its early echoes of Citizen Kane – the White House as
Xanadu, those missing 18 ½ minutes of the tape Nixon’s “Rosebud” – through to
the accelerated pace and film stock as events spiral out of the President’s
control, it’s an explosion of style that really works, even if there are points
which are too on-the-nose (a scene where Nixon’s dinner talk of war is
interrupted by a steak that leaks gallons of blood as he cuts into it, is
clumsy in the extreme).
Stone’s theories revolve around the true villain as being the system itself, a grindingly oppressive
beast that sets its own course, and chews up and spits out the men who think
they can ride it. Nixon may know that it’s real, but he’s as much a victim of
it as anything else. Its tendrils extend everywhere, from the creepily
domineering CIA chief Helms (Sam Waterston, unsettlingly intimidating in scenes
restored in the director’s cut) to the shady Texan money interests (led by an
excellent Larry Hagman of all people) who sure-as-shit want to get rid of that
liberal, Cuban surrender monkey Kennedy.
Nixon wants to control it, to do some good – and the film is
excellent at stressing how Nixon’s poverty-filled Quaker background invested
him with a drive to achieve but also chippy insecurity and moral standards from
his imperious mother he can never hope to meet – but what hope does he have? In
any case, his own deep moral failings doom any chance of forging his own goals,
sucking him into a quagmire where long-running dirty deeds, shady deals and
unedifying company consume him. “When they look at you they see what want to
be. When they look at me they see what they are” Nixon complains to the
painting of Kennedy, the rival whom he can never eclipse, the man born with all
the advantages that Nixon never had, the millionaire embraced by the people
while the working-class Nixon is reviled. It’s these resentments that consume
and destroy Nixon, and Stone presents this as an epic tragedy of a great
politician, crushed by his fundamentally human flaws.
Around Hopkins, Stone assembles a brilliant cast. Joan Allen
is superb as Nixon’s loving but insightful wife who won’t shy to speak truth to
power. James Woods is perfectly as the bullishly aggressive, fiercely loyal
Haldeman. Paul Sorvino does a wonderfully arch impersonation of Kissinger,
always keeping his distance. David Hyde Pierce makes a smoothly innocent but
determinedly self-preserving John Dean, Powers Boothe a wonderful cold
Alexander Haig. Only Bob Hoskins gives a performance slightly too broad as
Hoover – but he still laces the role with a crackling menace.
Nixon is a great
film, an explosion of style (perhaps at times a little too much), which
painstakingly strips bare the President’s psyche – his doubt, his guilt, his
bitterness, his resentments and finally his overwhelming self-pity. Powered by
a titanically well-observed performance by Anthony Hopkins, who is just about
perfect in every frame – every nuance of the President feels real – Nixon is a wallow in the dark underbelly
of America, which hints throughout of the even greater dangers that lie under
the surface, the powerful system maintaining the status quo that sees presidents
come and go, but never allows any changes to affect the results it’s aiming
for. It’s a remarkable film.
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