Review of Nixon (1995) by Andy B — 22 Oct 2008

A big, embroiled, spidery tangle of a film - perhaps the greatest ever made about American politics and the conception of power within the sphere of the American presidency. Oliver Stone's film delves into the psyche of Richard Milhous Nixon, perhaps the most unanimously despised president in American history and one of the most notorious leaders ever to bluster across the planet, and the product is epic, intensive, painful, horrifying, and illuminating.

Anthony Hopkins attempts what could safely be considered the impossible in recreating Nixon; he channels the late former president's gawkiness and awkward persona, his jerky physicality, and his distinct drawl.

However, he injects the role with a level of humanity of which many would have been incapable, and Nixon, so often viewed as the massive villainous elephant in the American history classroom, receives here a more pathetic veneer - that of an ordinary man, a tragically unremarkable third-rate politician and rube, who climbed the ladder of the politics of fear and myopia (among the likes of Joseph McCarthy and J.

Edgar Hoover) to the executive office only to be decimated in his own maelstrom of Caesarian control. One might consider the pathetic scene at the Lincoln Memorial between the bewildered, lackadaisical Nixon and the horde of enraged student protestors; it perfectly captures the tragedy of the man - not his villainy but rather his mediocrity - his inability to move beyond his defeat by Kennedy, his crude upbringing and rusticity, and his immensely unlikable personality.

Joan Allen, as the embattled and long-suffering Pat Nixon, is equally impressive in her subtlety; she is easily one of the greatest female American dramatists working today. Some of the supporting performances deserve particular attention - Bob Hoskins' slippery, Machiavellian J.

Edgar Hoover, Ric Young's simpering Mao, Sam Waterston's chilling, Yeats-reciting Richard Helms, Paul Sorvino's pitch-perfect (from the iconic glasses to the Strangelove accent) Henry Kissinger, Mary Steenburgen's puritanical Hannah Nixon, Larry Hagman's grotesque Texan oil tycoon, and Madeline Kahn's scene-stealing, doomed Martha Mitchell.

James Woods, E.G. Marshall, David Hyde Pierce, Tony Lo Bianco, Boris Sichkin, Powers Booth, Brian Bedford, and J.T. Walsh are all superb as well. John Williams' score is remarkably unobtrusive (a rare feat for the widely decorated but often bombastic musician), and the entire film is thick with the atmosphere of intrigue and moral collapse.

A dramatic and historical powerhouse - a remarkably acute and emotionally draining examination of an ever-incomprehensible period of American history.