Nixon

Rating:
Summary: Let Nixon be Nixon
Review: In this Oliver Stone film we are given more 'psycho-drama' than 'biopic'. Sadly, the latter would have been more entertaining. The real story of the Nixon presidency is full of intrigue and interesting controversies that could be played out on the screen, particularly with this large a talent pool. Instead we are given a fair amount of fancy camera work, flashbacks, ominous monologues, and a muttering drunken Nixon, watched from the shadows by his aides. Why the third star? Because there are some moments just too good not to miss. If the whole film had put the same sort of energy and zeal as can be found in the scene in which Nixon meets with Ziegler and Haig before going into a ceremony for returning POW's the film would have been 5 star. A Nixon, physically and emotionally collapsing from the strain of Watergate keeps calling Ziegler by the wrong name and nervously paces while attempting to create an alternate reality and deny his impending downfall. Hopkins in this scene BECOMES Nixon. Many of the events are highly compressed, two or three significant Nixon speeches or press conferences are combined into one which is fine but the poetic license takes a turn for the laughable when the film steals a line from FUTURE history that would not be used for ten years and inserts into the mouth of Al Haig. Haig, well played by Powers Booth, bolts into a hospital emergency room, a pnuemonia afflicted Nixon in tow and brushes aside hospital personnel with a shout of "I'm in charge here" - the line he uttered at the post-assisination attempt Reagan press conference. There are excellent attempts to portray Dean and Ehrlichman, but James Woods as Haldeman veers between 'yes man' and pyschotic tyrant, not so good. Edward Hermann does a brilliant job with a tiny role as Nelson Rockefeller, New York Governor and political power broker. Fyvush Finkel also deserves mention as Nixon's political fixer - Murray Chotiner and Saul Rubinek as early Nixon press spokesman Herb Klein. When you go out of your way to put such effort into performances of smaller, yet important Nixon players why then chop up and ignore large parts of the actual historical administration and take us on such a fanciful ride of psycho-babble. It seems the great movie on Nixon is yet to be made, but this is not a bad effort.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, but contrived, biographical film
Review: The first five minutes of this film made me wonder, "Why Anthony Hopkins as Nixon?" Surprisingly, however, as the film progresses, Hopkins delivers a great performance and he comes through in the clutch. While some might think his performance goes every where, I don't think it's really Hopkins' portrayal of Nixon that is unbalanced but the way the film portrays the man himself.

I felt very confused as to just how I was supposed to think of Nixon while watching this. At one moment we see a fascinating, determined man brought up with a bad family condition (two brothers killed, a hard father and religious mother), a man who is faithful to his wife and tries to please her whenever he can. Then suddenly we find a man who manipulates power, turns on friends, and seems to have a drug addiction (at least, one scene seems to point to that).

The end of the movie acts like Nixon was a victim of his own times, celebrating the achievements Nixon accomplished during his lifetime...but just an hour earlier, Oliver Stone showed bombs landing in Cambodia and added audio tracks of children screaming over the scene. Just what kind of man does he want us to think Nixon is?

In some ways this is probably another attempt by Oliver Stone to present anti-establishment feelings in a film. As said by another reviewer, Nixon himself realizes that the system is "a beast." There are other scenes in the movie that either discredit Nixon's innocence or seem to suggest like he was almost a monster: in the scene where Nixon decides on resignation he asks what other option he has, to which an aide replies "The military." This is quickly forgotten and the discussion moves on, and you wonder: why add it in at all? Was Stone trying to feed into anti-military feelings or trying to give another "The government is hunting you down" story like he did in "J.F.K." ? Nixon's ties with the mafia and other questionable references are added in and quickly forgotten, and as I said earlier you have to wonder just what sort of Nixon does Oliver Stone want us to believe in?

A scene near the beginning of the film has Nixon's aides asking what kind of Nixon the American people want to see. Perhaps Oliver Stone should have thought of that as he made this film - it has a fascinating "Stone-style" to it, but the script itself is extremely unbalanced in its pursuit.

Rating:
Summary: Is there any psychotic answer to a changing world?
Review: 1968 was a devilish year in the world. Everything everywhere was exploding into chaos. Nixon got elected because of that chaos that led Johnson to step down and because of Vietnam that had sunk into a quagmire and an unavoidable defeat. All that was the sign of a changing world, a world that was changing faster than anyone could foresee and follow. Changing in the West and changing in the East. The East froze down for twenty more years : no change possible. Defeat in the end. The West had started moving with Kennedy, but in the US private and shadowy interests led to the assassinations of John Kennedy himself, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and in the world the same interests pushed the US ever deeper into the war in Vietnam. Nixon was elected on some kind of quiproquo. He answered that great call for change with old recipes : politics and no ideal, just plain maneuvering. He tried to save the face in Vietnam by forcing the Vietnamese to the negociation table by crushing them and Cambodia and Laos under millions of tons of bombs, by negociating with Mao and recognizing continental China, even though it was communist, and by negociating with Breshnev to buy some kind of peace. Vietnam came to an end after hard negociations that could not in any way guarantee self-determination to the South. There was peace at last, but honor was just a temporary illusion, a political disguise, because everyone knew what was to happen and what did happen. He was never loved by anyone because he refused to compromise with anyone, he imposed his vision and his decisions, even to Kissinger, though Kissinger outmaneuvered him in the long run. Mao was more visionary than Nixon because Mao probably knew what he was doing : opening China on the world and putting China on the road towards becoming a superpower, the superpower it is today in the process of becoming. Breshnev was just saving time for his USSR by cutting his military budget and satisfying some of his people by bringing some measure of peace. But this time-saving policy was doomed anyway. In the US, Nixon's policy was also doomed and Nixon was condemned from the very start : he did not take a democratic road, he did not provide the US with a government from the people, by the people, for the people : he imposed his governement mostly characterised by the abuse of his powers and by the misuse of his office. The big change was still to come when he finally resigned. But has that change come ? I will not answer the question : everyone may have his own opinion. The film though questions the personal level of Nixon's career. He failed in his presidency because he was not loved, so does Oliver Stone say. Maybe he was not loved because he was a bully with everyone, a leader as his mother said later, a man and even a boy who imposed his will, his decisions, his power, his leadership. But why was he like that ? He imitated his father as the film hints. Maybe. Or was he psychotic from the very start and developing some severe case of paranoia ? Maybe. The film leads to these ideas that I do not want to call conclusions. Hypotheses at the best. Nixon was/is a mystery and will remain a mystery, maybe forever.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: Anthony Hopkins as "President Richard Nixon".
Review: Only if you are a Richard Nixon fan, will you enjoy this film. Here is Oliver Stone's vision of the political life of Richard Nixon to his destiny of becoming the President of the United States and his ultimate resignation in 1974. Who would of thought of Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon. But it works and Anthony Hopkins did a spectacular performance in this all-star movie. This VHS version runs 3 hours, 10 minutes. Interesting cucumber scene between Bob Hoskins and Wilson Cruz. May I recommend...

Rating:
Summary: As Credible and delightful as 'Birth of A Nation'
Review: Oliver Stone has once again butchered the discipline of history and has taken on the professionals. I mean, where do you begin with this joke of a film? Stone must have written the screenplay while he was high on some of the drugs he recently got arrested for!? Stone's Nixon is a stooge of big business, insecure, drunk, uses profanity endlessly, and calls Pat Nixon Buddy. I have listened to all of the Watergate tapes in the archives, and although Nixon does cuss, he does not use the 'F-word' often. Compared to the media's focus on Nixon's profanity, the real Nixon seems quite reserved. Perhaps the worst aspect of the film is that it portrays Pat Nixon as a drunk, chain-smoking cocktail waitress who only appears on screen to ask Dick for a divorce. The use of buddy comes from Fawn Brody, a woman that turned on her Mormon faith by claiming 'she knew the real truth about Smith.' After she was ran out of Utah, she wrote the most discredited biography of RN in 1960. Nixon never called Pat 'buddy.' The films distorts the facts to follow its premise that the U.S. is controlled by 'the beast,' I.E. the establishment to put it in Stone's lingo. If Stone would have read what Nixon said at the Lincoln memorial, as witnessed by the students and his aides, he said, "we are trying to build a world where people don't have to die for what they believe in." But, Stone had to ignore that to put the beast in. Also, JFK is glorified like some kind of saint. Hey Stone, JFK and Jackie's marriage was on the rocks, not Nixon's; JFK wiretapped all of his enemies and used the IRS to abuse power; JFK assasinated Diem; He was no peacemaker and the list of Kennedy corruption and faults of this propaganda could fill an entire volume of books. The movie is as slanderous as Birth of a Nation and will be remembered as such!

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly good
Review: I probably would have seen this movie earlier if Anthony Hopkins face wasn't on the cover. He doesn't look anything like Nixon, but its amazing how much he starts to look like Nixon once you actually watch the film! Not just his mannerisms and voice (which are spot on) but even his look.

I thought this movie was surprisingly fair to Nixon. It matches much of what I've read about him, especially Chris Matthews book about Nixon and Kennedy. (Although I admit that book is more entertainment than historical document as well)

Some of the cinematography and editing was a little too extreme. It only detracted from a well directed and well acted film.

edited: As I learn more about Nixon, I am discovering that probably more and more of the details illustrated in this film were factual, or commonly accepted as having occured. I didn't believe that Nixon's encounter with Vietnam protesters on the Lincoln Memorial steps actually occured, but it is reported that it did.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed, yes, but a great film nonetheless
Review: This may indeed be Oliver Stone's masterpiece, although as one would expect from Oliver Stone, it is a flawed and disjointed masterpiece, a monumental tragedy in the cathartic mode of the ancient Greeks. There is an Orson Welles/Citizen Kane quality about the film that is fascinating, including a journalistic/newsreel-ish feel that is unmistakably derivative. But it isn't really about Richard Nixon. Rather what Oliver Stone has constructed here is a mythology about a certain political persona that resembles Nixon in a milieu that resembles American politics and some things that happened once upon a time some thirty years ago.

Anthony Hopkins is brilliant and compelling in the title role, but in no way would I mistake him for Richard Milhouse Nixon. He is both too depraved and all too human in his intense portrayal of the only president to resign under the pressure of impeachment. The Richard Nixon that I recall played his cards much closer to his vest (he was a terrific poker player, according to his naval buddies who lost a lot of their mustering out money to him aboard ship) and was not nearly as sympathetic as Hopkins and Stone make him. Nixon was cold and unfeeling except when it came to something that touched on his self-interest, and then he became pathological.

One sees in this film traces of Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) in that he hints of a Cuban plot to kill John F. Kennedy while imagining that Lee Harvey Oswald was Cuban-inspired. Indeed, Stone intimates that J. Edgar Hoover was somehow involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 partly because he wanted to insure Nixon's victory by eliminating the one person who could beat him, and partly because his experience with Robert Kennedy as Attorney General was not a pleasant one for Hoover.

Conspiracy was in the air in those days, and many Americans took it as gospel that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a player in those assassinations. And of course it is always wise to ask who benefits from certain events, and there is no doubt that Nixon would have had a lot more trouble beating Robert Kennedy in 1968 than he had in beating George McGovern. And Bobby Kennedy as president would have been a nightmare for the corrupt J. Edgar Hoover and his fiefdom.

But Oliver Stone is not really interested in actual history as much as he is in his vision of the tortured Nixon himself and his fall from grace. It is strange but although Hopkins did not really look like Nixon or behave like Nixon (although he had some of the mannerisms down pat) it didn't matter because somehow he became a Nixon-like personage, a kind of ghost of Nixon, perhaps, a Nixon truer than true in some ways with his ever present worry about his image and his obsession with the Kennedy glamour that he could never have, his "Republican cloth-coat" middle-class heritage, and his gift for political infighting.

One of the best scenes occurs under the Lincoln memorial as Nixon is confronted by some Vietnam War protestors and especially one 19-year-old girl who challenges his view of his responsibility and ultimately of himself. What Stone is able to do through such scenes is to make Anthony Hopkins's Nixon more sympathetic than the real Nixon ever was. We see Hopkins as a tortured Shakespearean protagonist, King Lear or Othello or Hamlet, souls tormented with the contrast between the grandeur of their station, and the weakness of their flesh.

Another great scene is when the Texas power broker threatens Nixon by reminding him "who made him" and "who can destroy him." Nixon is unperturbed as he counter-threatens the power broker with the holy terror of the IRS, and then smiles as though it is just another day at the office.

A third great scene is late in the film as a drunken Pat Nixon confronts Nixon, who is falling apart under the pressure of the Watergate investigation, her eyes the eyes of woman looking at a worm, her manner accusatory and venomous.

In the end we come to identify with Nixon as we did with Lear and Hamlet, although of course Nixon properly seen is more like Claudius.

The cast is eclectic and you really need a program to keep track of them. Although I recall the players from the Nixon years, Haldeman, Erhlichman, Henry Kissinger, John Dean, Al Haig, Attorney General John Mitchell and his bimbo wife Martha (burlesqued in a fine cameo by Madeline Kahn), and the rest of them, I couldn't form distinct persons in my mind. The actors themselves are top notch for the most part, James Woods, J. T. Walsh, Paul Sorvino, Ed Harris, E.G. Marshall, etc., but the real world contrast between their countenances and those of the historical figures was so glaring as to be almost comical at times.

Of course there was no getting around this. Stone had to either hire unknown actors or to just live with the unreality of the actors not really resembling the people they were portraying. There were some striking exceptions, however. Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, the president's straight-laced and ever loyal (in public) wife was something close to a dead-ringer, and Allen did a brilliant job of bringing the historical first lady to life. Sorvino did not look all that much like Henry Kissinger, but his voice and manner were absolutely perfect. David Barry Gray who played Nixon as a young man did indeed look a lot like the young Nixon. Corey Carrier who played him as a boy was much like I would imagine Nixon as a boy.

Also worth noting are Mary Steenburgen who played Nixon's mother, and Bob Hoskins who played J. Edgar Hoover. Steenburgen seemed the very embodiment of the wise and hardtack Quaker mother while Hoskins's sleazy lampoon of Hoover was creepy enough to make your skin crawl.

Rating:
Summary: stone's most under-rated movie
Review: I think this movie wasn't as successful as "JFK" because the American public doesn't like Nixon as a person as well as Kennedy, but I believe this movie is as good as "JFK," and probably moreso. The new dvd edition is especially worth the price with two commentaries by Stone. There has been some criticism that commentary A is more informational, but commentary B provides interesting background as well. This is a movie that improves with each viewing and is appropriately complex, given its subject. To study Nixon is to study America's history for the last half of the 20th century, and this film is probably the first to give the man the serious treatment he deserves. Previous movies have either depicted Nixon as pure evil or as a caricature to be made sport of. He was neither evil nor a buffoon.

Rating:
Summary: A True Camp Classic!
Review: Wow! This is one of the most overwrought, over the top, insane movies I've ever seen! Is it accurate? About as much as "Bowling for Columbine", let's say, but with one huge difference: This is hugely entertaining. Featuring a large cast of well-known actors all hamming it up like if it was 1999--even ham and cheesing it up! No piece of scenery goes unchewed, especially by Anthony Hopkins, Joan Allen, and Bob Hoskins. Hilarious, hysterical, preposterous. This is a true camp classic in the tradition of Mommy Dearest and Sunset Boulevard. You might not learn much about Nixon, but it sure reveals an awful lot about Oliver Stone's state of mind. This guy must have spent the 60s eating the brown acid--is he allowed to walk around in public unattended? At over three hours it's too long for those who might have something else to do so I'm taking off a star, but if you can find the time to sit through it all at once you'll find it hard to take your eyes off this demented train wreck of a movie. A comedic masterpiece, really, though probably not in the way Stone (or is that "Stoned") intended.

Rating:
Summary: Don't be a crook & rob yourself of a great DVD
Review: A riveting documentary of Richard Nixon (Played by Hopkins) takes us through various stages in Nixon's life. Contains actual footage & news items during Nixon's career as president. You'll find out ... that Nixon LIED virtually all of his life. ... Added scenes from the original movie makes it just that much better.