Copyright Commonweal Foundation Jan 26, 1996Nixon may not be the last word on the thirty-seventh president, but it is the ultimate Oliver Stone movie. The nature of the filmmaker is here, undistilled: the paranoia, the pretentiousness, the simple-minded views of recent American history and institutions, the spasmodic flashes of real talent, the shrewdness in selecting and directing actors, and--above all--the unbounded confidence of the man as he tries to explain all the historical convulsions of the last three decades by evoking the Fu Manchu nefariousness of a few organizations, as if Sax Rohmer or Ian Fleming had undertaken the task of an Arnold Toynbee.
Paranoia is both Stone's fuel and the gift he seeks to bestow on the public. His Nixon may be a mover and shaker but he is, first and last, a victim. A victim first of his own past--family background, era, economic origin, etc.-but also a victim of...Them. And who are Them? The usual suspects: the C.I.A., evil Texas billionaires, the F.B.I., the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans. Stone just barely distinguishes among them and seems to feel that they work, if not together, on the same projects and toward the same goals.
Nevertheless, it is the C.I.A. that bears the brunt of Nixon's slurred but all-encompassing J'accuse. Early in the film, H.R. Haldeman, reporting to his boss about the burglars who have broken into the Watergate complex, mentions that E. Howard Hunt leads them. Nixon blanches. "You know Hunt, sir?" asks John Dean. Oh boy, does he ever] Not with Nixon's consent but with his unresisting knowledge, the C.I.A., to put and keep a Republican in the White House, seems to have effected every violent change in American politics throughout the sixties and seventies: the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and King, the shooting of George Wallace. I write "seems" because Stone never really pins down just what the C.I.A did or whom it worked with or just how much was connived at by other organizations working with or against the C.I.A. Since he obviously doesn't have any hard evidence against anyone, Stone operates through cinematic innuendo. Let J. Edgar Hoover raise a sinister eye brow and we cut to some headline announcing an assassination. Evil Texas millionaires exchange conspiratorial looks as the Kennedy presidential plane lands in Dallas. A news clip of Teddy Kennedy walking out of the Chappaquiddick inquest is nestled within a volley of shots of E. Howard Hunt or some other agent slinking off into the night fog.
I must confess that I'm writing phrases such as "some headline" and "Hunt or some other agent because, after only one viewing, I'm not sure I'm pairing innuendoes with political events correctly. How could I be? Stone's editing methods don't strive for clarity but for saturation bombing of the viewer's mind. Besides, Stone isn't really trying to advance a factually supported case. His incriminating montages are the cinematic equivalents of Joe McCarthy's tactics, and this may be why Stone is generally despised by serious political journalists, especially the liberal ones. But if his films achieve little that is practical in the narrow sense of the word, they may very well color the thinking of people, especially young people, who haven't read or thought deeply about politics. They create a kind of reflexive suspicion about government in the spectator that is as unhealthy as reflexive trust.
But there is more to this movie than all the above, and it is this something more that makes it one of Stone's better efforts. The film isn't just a promoter of paranoia in the viewer but also a portrayal of paranoia in its protagonist. On this level, it's pretty good show. There really is a Nixon in Nixon.
The collaboration (I almost wrote "conspiracy") between Stone and Anthony Hopkins is a unique one. Using flashbacks to Nixon's past and quick excursions into his dreams, the writer-director seems to be creating a cinematic essay explaining why Nixon's body looks and moves the way it does: a half-unstrung marionette prowling to kill the puppetmaster, or Ed Sullivan on a bad mescaline trip. It's almost as if the actor were a text which Stone was annotating.
Reviewing The Remains of the Day (Commonweal, December 17, 1993), I noted that Hopkins's "specialty is fierce emotion unsuccessfully suppressed." Here, the unsuccessful suppression becomes barely concealed frenzy. Watching the real Richard Nixon on TV twenty-one years ago, I gasped as I saw the president of the United States storm out of a press room, stop in his tracks and turn, grab Ron Ziegler, and hurl the hapless press secretary back at the reporters who had been snapping at Nixon's heels. That moment is in the movie, and though it can't possibly be as shocking as the actual event, it is a key moment in the Stone-Hopkins portrait. This is a Nixon who has a demon sewn under his skin and quite often the demon takes over and lashes out. The trollish frenzy of the famous victory gesture, the nervous clearing of the throat as he mentally gropes for something to say, the instantly manufactured smile flashed at his audiences like a malediction ("You want charm from me? Take that, damn you]"), these we may remember of the real Nixon, but Hopkins hasn't merely mimicked, he's poetically aggravated his subject's pathos, desperation, and nastiness to achieve a Goyaesque luridity. Hopkins's performance is unforgettable.
And what frame does Stone build to contain this force? A Freudian one. Mary Steenburgen's skillful rendering of Nixon's Quaker mother as an animate but untouchable icon ("My mother was a saint," Nixon said at his staff farewell) is perhaps the key to this movie. In her perfect rectitude, she cannot be satisfied by any material accomplishment by her son. To blame himself for this eternal failure in her eyes would be too much to bear, so the external causes for failure are created: the Kennedys, the media, the Eastern establishment, But, in an Oliver Stone movie, all paranoiacs have real enemies, and Nixon's-according to Stone--are all those secret agents and --sinister billionaires.
And sex. Ah, yes. Sex, too, is an enemy since it diverts a man from the work of constant warfare that is Nixonian politics. And so Pat Nixon (brilliantly played by Joan Allen) is made over by Stone into an oddly sexual figure whose warm, sensual love must be avoided by her husband so that he can concentrate on what a Real Man must do: Destroy his enemies and rule the world. The ascension to the throne is also a Flight from Woman. Within the carapace that he has turned his body into, Hopkins-Nixon shelters and suffers.
Much of Stone's film technique has degenerated into a collection of mannerisms: the sudden shifting to black-and-white, for instance, only makes sense in the childhood flashbacks. The staging of the meetings with Brezhnev and Mao hover uncertainly between satire and genuflection. And Nixon's near-death encounter with otherworldly beings is a ghastly dive into the world of supermarket tabloids. Generally, though, the restlessness of the film's style matches Nixon's psychological turmoil, just as the paranoia of Stone's worldview finds its proper avatar in the paranoid Nixon. In the closing scenes, when the director puts away his bag of tricks and simply bears down on the lonely figure of the president as he walks the darkened hallways of a fear-encased White House, something grindingly powerful is at last achieved.
In his faults, in his strengths, Richard Nixon was an archetypal American. In his faults, in his strengths, Oliver Stone is an archetypal American artist of the postmodern era. The pairing of this filmmaker with this protagonist is a marriage made and annealed in Hell.
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