Director: Oliver Stone
Entertainment grade: C+
History grade: C
Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. Following the Watergate scandal, he resigned to avoid impeachment in 1974.
Politics
From the very beginning, Nixon is depicted as a man haunted by his own wickedness. So he sweats and stammers his way through the 1960 television debate with John F Kennedy, through the speech when he accepts the Republican nomination in 1968, and through "I am not a crook." If you look any of these up on YouTube, you'll see that this isn't right at all. Nixon was actually a decisive, confident speaker – which was how he convinced large numbers of people to vote for him. Good grief, this film is already forcing the historian to defend Nixon, and it's only just started.
Rivalry
Nixon's resentment of JFK and his brothers is a recurring theme. A lot of the speculation here on connections between American relations with Cuba and the assassination of Kennedy is extremely questionable, but you don't go to an Oliver Stone movie expecting straight, canonical history with no conspiracy theories. "If I'd been president, they never would have killed me," Nixon gloats after Kennedy is shot. Like many of the film's lines, it sounds over the top, but it's actually very close to what the real Nixon said in one of his memoirs, RN: "I did not think of Kennedy and myself as interchangeable. I did not think that if I had won in 1960 it would have been I rather than he riding through Dealey Plaza in Dallas at that time, on that day." Points to the movie.
Casting
Anthony Hopkins brings plenty of Hannibal Lecter to Richard Nixon, a man who doesn't really need any more Hannibal Lecter brought to him. The glinting, theatrical menace tips over into cartoonish mwah-ha-ha evil roughly once every 10 minutes. So it ends up with a Nixon who is three parts Hannibal the Cannibal and one part Baron Greenback, the supervillain toad from Danger Mouse. Unfortunately, the real 37th president had access to weapons rather more destructive than the Baron's giggle gun.
Scandal
The film likes high camp scenes that hint at shady dealings, but it doesn't want to burden itself with telling you what's actually going on. We get a clandestine rendezvous in which E Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) terrorises poor, innocent little John Dean (David Hyde Pierce), but no real explanation of who Hunt and Dean are. And Bob Hoskins turns up, pleasantly well cast as J Edgar Hoover; but instead of giving anything away about who Hoover was, or how he related to Nixon and the Kennedys, the film just shows him in a fluffy white bathrobe eating fruit out of the mouth of a hunky poolboy. Which is almost certainly historically justifiable. But out of context it's mystifying, and looks vaguely homophobic. So now not only is the historian defending Nixon, she's defending Hoover. You've got a lot to answer for, Oliver Stone.
Style
The director's unwillingness to state the obvious soon comes to an end. In its place, we get the ghost of Nixon's mother hovering around his wife, while both of them tell him off. It's like being whacked over the head with a copy of Freud for Dummies. We get Henry Kissinger (Paul Sorvino, perfectly cast) intoning: "Can you imagine what this man would have been, had he ever been loved?" We even get Nixon talking about dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi while chopping up a steak. Unrealistic quantities of blood start pouring out of the steak. In case you haven't noticed that there's BLOOD and he's talking about WAR and it's SYMBOLIC, he bellows: "There's blood all over my plate! Take it away!"
Verdict
If they'd added a few songs, this would have made a pretty decent opera.
