For all its bluster and bombast, Oliver Stone's "Nixon," a dark, disturbing portrait of the former president, boils down to a very simple notion about its subject. It comes late in the film as a character suggests that instead of the madman he became, Nixon could have been a great hero if only he had been loved as a child.
You may reach that conclusion a lot sooner than the three-hours-plus it takes Stone - say, about 90 seconds into the flashbacks of Nixon's childhood.Of course, Stone is busy cramming into this movie every important issue that ever brushed up against Nixon . . . and a few that are obviously pure conjecture.
"Nixon" never has time to dwell on anything, leaping from the good (America's relations with China) to the bad (Watergate) to the ugly (his rapid decline into depressive and drunken foul-mouthed despair before his resignation), not necessarily in that order.
But you may well ask, did Pat really ask him for a divorce in 1962? Did Nixon really call her "Buddy," and turn away a sexual advance by telling her, "I'm not Jack Kennedy"? And did he, in later years, constantly refer to himself in the third person? At one point, Stone even suggests that Nixon had foreknowledge of the Kennedy assassination, if not specific complicity.
The black-and-white flashbacks to Nixon's youth in Whittier, Calif., show him as the son of strict Quaker parents (Mary Steenburgen plays his mother), which leads to his guilt at being the only one of three brothers to survive to adulthood. And late in the film, when his audiotapes are subpoenaed and he realizes the world will see his profane rantings, we see a quick ghostly shot of his mother, sitting, observing and obviously disapproving.
All of this results in a steeplechase of familiar and speculative factoids, rehashed and/or invented to suit our soundbite/tabloid-oriented society.
Basically, the narrative is built around Nixon's desperation just prior to his resignation, as he listens drunkenly to the incriminating audiotapes he used to record intimate conversations in the White House.
But there is no linear chronology. The movie jumps all over the place, while Stone employs several film techniques - 8mm/16mm/videotape/black and white/color/newsreel - to give a flashback, home-movie or documentary feel to the proceedings.
His usage of these elements is not as frenetic as in "Natural Born Killers," but much of it still seems overdone. When a single scene jumps from crisp color to grainy black and white for no apparent reason, it's a disservice to the story, alienating the audience with distractions.
What saves the film, at least to some degree, are specific set-pieces, highlighted by an array of performances that range from merely interesting (Bob Hoskins, playing J. Edgar Hoover as a ruthless flaming gay) to more intriguing (Paul Sorvino, under incredible makeup as Henry Kissinger) to knock-your-socks-off amazing (Anthony Hopkins as Nixon, Joan Allen as his wife, Pat).
It is Hopkins, of course, who is the centerpiece here, and though he does not specifically resemble Nixon, he has captured the former president's mannerisms, the stoop-shouldered walk, the cadence of his speech, etc., in a remarkable way. Even when a news-footage shot of the real Nixon shows up near the film's end, you never feel Hopkins' performance was anything less than an Oscar-worthy re-creation.
"Nixon" is also filled with inside references (the opening sequence seems to be an homage to "Citizen Kane"), and after hearing Hopkins' Nixon rail against the media and bark about supposed conspiracies, those who are aware of the filmmaker's peccadillos may begin to wonder if Stone isn't using the former president as a metaphorical means of making an autobiography.
Still, there is not much here you haven't read or seen before, and in fact Stone is probably banking on audience familiarity, since so much flits by so quickly.
"Nixon" is rated R for violence (primarily on newsreel footage) and language (profanity, vulgarity, racial epithets).