Review of Nixon (1995) by Kenneth H — 25 Nov 2009

A long and confusing mess of a film. The upsides are that it portrays Richard Nixon sympathetically and holistically, and Anthony Hopkins's performance (as well as those of the rest of the cast) is superb. And of course, political history is always interesting.

But the way this movie was done was terrible. The length might be a tad excessive (two and a half hours on the Director's Cut that I watched), though that can be forgiven if the movie was done right. But it wasn't. It had a (surprise, surprise) non-linear storyline that sucked big time; it bounced all over the place between different dates, from the 1970s to earlier in the '70s to the early '60s to the mid '20s then back to the '70s and then back to the '60s again... and it made the film confusing and impossible to follow. The film was filled with random, pointless, stupid and distracting flashbacks and cutaways, and in some scenes we even had random words flashing across the screen that had at most minimal relevance to what was going on. Most notably, during a scene where Nixon is conferring with Mao Zedong, random Chinese characters, including the one meaning "old", repeatedly flashed across the scene. WTF is that supposed to mean? And then when Nixon was meeting with Leonid Brezhnev we got Russian words flashing across the screen. Yay, now we know what Russian words look like... terrific. And then there's the random switching between black-and-white and color throughout the movie and even during the same scene.

All in all, the confusing patchwork of out-of-order scenes, complete with distracting flashbacks and cutaways, made me feel like the whole story was not only impossible to follow but incomplete as well. Would it really have killed Oliver Stone to just tell the story straight?