Nixon By temperament, Oliver Stone is ideally suited to capture the paranoid style in Nixonian politics
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva TWO OF A KIND Stone & Nixon Nixon may not be the last word on the thirty-seventh president, but it is the ulti- mate Oliver Stone movie. The nature of the filmmaker is here,...
...In his faults, in his strengths, Oliver Stone is an archetypal American artist of the postmodern era...
...This is a Nixon who has a demon sewn under his skin and quite often the demon takes over and lashes out...
...Hopkins's performance is unforgettable...
...Within the carapace that he has turned his body into, Hopkins-Nixon shelters and suffers...
...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 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...
...On this level, it's a pretty good show...
...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...
...Take that, damn you...
...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...
...Evil Texas millionaires exchange conspiratorial looks as the Kennedy presidential plane lands in Dallas...
...How could I be...
...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...
...And who are Them...
...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...
...I write "seems" because Stone never really pins down just what the C.I...
...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 grind-ingly powerful is at last achieved...
...And Nixon's near-death encounter with otherworldly beings is a ghastly dive into the world of supermarket tabloids...
...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...
...Early in the film, H.R...
...Oh boy, does he ever...
...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...
...Haldeman, reporting to his boss about the burglars who have broken into the Watergate complex, mentions that E. Howard Hunt leads them...
...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...
...Ah, yes...
...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...
...Let J. Edgar Hoover raise a sinister eyebrow and we cut to some headline announcing an assassination...
...Sex, top, is an enemy since it diverts a man from the work of constant warfare that is Nixonian politics...
...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...
...The usual suspects: the C.I...
...The pairing of this filmmaker with this protagonist is a marriage made and annealed in Hell...
...A., evil Texas billionaires, the F.B.I., the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans...
...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...
...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...
...It's almost as if the actor were a text which Stone was annotating...
...In his faults, in his strengths, Richard Nixon was an archetypal American...
...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...
...A news clip of Teddy Kennedy walking out of the Chappa-quiddick inquest is nestled within a volley of shots of E. Howard Hunt or some other agent slinking off into the night fog...
...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 puppet-master, or Ed Sullivan on a bad mesca-line trip...
...Since he obviously doesn't have any hard evidence against anyone, Stone operates through cinematic innuendo...
...His Nixon may be a mover and shaker but he is, first and last, a victim...
...asks John Dean...
...You know Hunt, sir...
...A Freudian one...
...The film isn't just a promoter of paranoia in the viewer but also a portrayal of paranoia in its protagonist...
...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...
...A. that bears the brunt of Nixon's slurred but all-encompassing Yaccuse...
...The ascension . to the throne is also a Flight from Woman...
...Paranoia is both Stone's fuel and the gift he seeks to bestow on the public...
...They create a kind of reflexive suspicion about government in the spectator that is as unhealthy as reflexive trust...
...The staging of the meetings with Brezhnev and Mao hover uncertainly between satire and genuflection...
...There really is a Nixon in Nixon...
...And sex...
...Nevertheless, it is the C.I...
...Nixon blanches...
...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...
...The collaboration (I almost wrote "conspiracy") between Stone and Anthony Hopkins is a unique one...
...Stone's editing methods don't strive for clarity but for saturation bombing of the viewer's mind...
...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 what frame does Stone build to contain this force...
...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...
...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...
...In her perfect rectitude, she cannot be satisfied by any material accomplishment by her son...
...A victim first of his own past-family background, era, economic origin, etc.-but also a victim of...Them...
...Besides, Stone isn't really trying to advance a factually supported case...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 2
