Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absorbing and engrossing, November 8, 2004
When Anthony Hopkins was cast as Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone's bio of the 37th President, many were leery of the casting choice. I myself pictured Hopkins doing a combination of Nixon and Hannibal Lecter: "I'm not a crook -- and if anyone thinks so, I'll eat their liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti .... SLURP!!" However, Hopkins does do a marvelous job and disappears into the role without becoming a standup comedian's caricature. Even though Nixon does and says vile things throughout the film, the audience still has sympathy for the character -- even those like me who found the real Richard Nixon dispicable.
Stone portrays Nixon as a tragic figure who had the intelligence and the electoral mandate to elevate himself and his administration to greatness, but let it all slip away by becoming bogged down in the quagmire of Watergate. Nixon complains incessantly about how the Kennedys are everything he is not. However, it becomes clear that his hatred of the Kennedys is based as much on his loathing of himself as on any real scorn shown him by the "Eastern establishment."
Stone, as in JFK, takes certain liberties with Nixon's story and acknowledges as much in a disclaimer before the story begins. Even those who believe President Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, for example, would find it hard to believe that Richard Nixon was involved, even tacitly, in the plot to kill JFK. Stone also takes liberties with his portrayal of Richard and Pat Nixon's marital relationship. Even though some incidents are no doubt true, it's pretty clear that some scenes between the two are conjecture on Stone's part.
However, these are minor quibbles. Nixon is a penetrating, engrossing biography that both portrays him as a ruthless, vicous, paranoic lunatic and a character who elicits sympathy from the audience. The supporting cast is amazing and includes James Woods, Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, David Hyde Pierce, Annabeth Gish, Kevin Dunn, J.T. Walsh, Powers Booth, Paul Sorvino, Edward Herrmann, Larry Hagman, Dan Hedeya, Tony LoBianco, Bob Hoskins, E.G. Marshall, David Paymer, Tony Goldwyn, Fuyvush Finkel and Saul Rubinek. However, the standout supporting player is Joan Allen as Pat Nixon who is a dead ringer for the former First Lady. Allen's portrayal shows the emotional pain Mrs. Nixon endured behind the seemingly placid facade she presented to the American public. Coupled with Hopkins' Nixon, it's an acting tour de force that carries the film.
After all the vile things he does during the course of the film, Nixon, the night before his resignation, is reduced to staring at a portrait of his idolized archenemy John F. Kennedy and proclaiming that "... when they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are." Even the most die-hard member of Nixon's enemies' list can't help but feel pity for Richard Nixon during this scene. It's a great achievement by Oliver Stone to make this bitter, corrupt and wretched man worthy of the audience's sympathy at the same time we disdain him.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"This is god-damned Disneyland....", December 25, 1999
By A Customer
Oliver Stone's fascinating insight into the Nixon administration is not for everyone's delight. The closest thing to a "JFK" sequal, 'Nixon' rolls all the players into a ball of naughtiness & takes it from there. Hard to keep up with if un-familiar with the facts surrounding the 'watergate-scandal', but if you know your homework it's alot of fun. Superb casting,I must say, Stone started this epic right after "Natural Born Killers" so it has all the internal flare of film-making. Immense enjoyment on DVD, this film IS very under-rated,losing 'Best Picture' oscar to Mel Gibson's "Braveheart"... you can see how not everybody wants this film around in the long-run. Thumbs up!
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed, yes, but a great film nonetheless, April 5, 2005
This may indeed be Oliver Stone's masterpiece, although as one would expect from Oliver Stone, it is a flawed and disjointed masterpiece, a monumental tragedy in the cathartic mode of the ancient Greeks. There is an Orson Welles/Citizen Kane quality about the film that is fascinating, including a journalistic/newsreel-ish feel that is unmistakably derivative. But it isn't really about Richard Nixon. Rather what Oliver Stone has constructed here is a mythology about a certain political persona that resembles Nixon in a milieu that resembles American politics and some things that happened once upon a time some thirty years ago.
Anthony Hopkins is brilliant and compelling in the title role, but in no way would I mistake him for Richard Milhous Nixon. He is both too depraved and all too human in his intense portrayal of the only president to resign under the pressure of impeachment. The Richard Nixon that I recall played his cards much closer to his vest (he was a terrific poker player, according to his naval buddies who lost a lot of their mustering out money to him aboard ship) and was not nearly as sympathetic as Hopkins and Stone make him. Nixon was cold and unfeeling except when it came to something that touched on his self-interest, and then he became pathological.
One sees in this film traces of Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) in that he hints of a Cuban plot to kill John F. Kennedy while imagining that Lee Harvey Oswald was Cuban-inspired. Indeed, Stone intimates that J. Edgar Hoover was somehow involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 partly because he wanted to insure Nixon's victory by eliminating the one person who could beat him, and partly because his experience with Robert Kennedy as Attorney General was not a pleasant one for Hoover.
Conspiracy was in the air in those days, and many Americans took it as gospel that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a player in those assassinations. And of course it is always wise to ask who benefits from certain events, and there is no doubt that Nixon would have had a lot more trouble beating Robert Kennedy in 1968 than he had in beating George McGovern. And Bobby Kennedy as president would have been a nightmare for the corrupt J. Edgar Hoover and his fiefdom.
But Oliver Stone is not really interested in actual history as much as he is in his vision of the tortured Nixon himself and his fall from grace. It is strange but although Hopkins did not really look like Nixon or behave like Nixon (although he had some of the mannerisms down pat) it didn't matter because somehow he became a Nixon-like personage, a kind of ghost of Nixon, perhaps, a Nixon truer than true in some ways with his ever present worry about his image and his obsession with the Kennedy glamour that he could never have, his "Republican cloth-coat" middle-class heritage, and his gift for political infighting.
One of the best scenes occurs under the Lincoln memorial as Nixon is confronted by some Vietnam War protestors and especially one 19-year-old girl who challenges his view of his responsibility and ultimately of himself. What Stone is able to do through such scenes is to make Anthony Hopkins's Nixon more sympathetic than the real Nixon ever was. We see Hopkins as a tortured Shakespearean protagonist, King Lear or Othello or Hamlet, souls tormented with the contrast between the grandeur of their station, and the weakness of their flesh.
Another great scene is when the Texas power broker threatens Nixon by reminding him "who made him" and "who can destroy him." Nixon is unperturbed as he counter-threatens the power broker with the holy terror of the IRS, and then smiles as though it is just another day at the office.
A third great scene is late in the film as a drunken Pat Nixon confronts Nixon, who is falling apart under the pressure of the Watergate investigation, her eyes the eyes of woman looking at a worm, her manner accusatory and venomous.
In the end we come to identify with Nixon as we did with Lear and Hamlet, although of course Nixon properly seen is more like Claudius.
The cast is eclectic and you really need a program to keep track of them. Although I recall the players from the Nixon years, Haldeman, Erhlichman, Henry Kissinger, John Dean, Al Haig, Attorney General John Mitchell and his bimbo wife Martha (burlesqued in a fine cameo by Madeline Kahn), and the rest of them, I couldn't form distinct persons in my mind. The actors themselves are top notch for the most part, James Woods, J. T. Walsh, Paul Sorvino, Ed Harris, E.G. Marshall, etc., but the real world contrast between their countenances and those of the historical figures was so glaring as to be almost comical at times.
Of course there was no getting around this. Stone had to either hire unknown actors or to just live with the unreality of the actors not really resembling the people they were portraying. There were some striking exceptions, however. Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, the president's straight-laced and ever loyal (in public) wife was something close to a dead-ringer, and Allen did a brilliant job of bringing the historical first lady to life. Sorvino did not look all that much like Henry Kissinger, but his voice and manner were absolutely perfect. David Barry Gray who played Nixon as a young man did indeed look a lot like the young Nixon. Corey Carrier who played him as a boy was much like I would imagine Nixon as a boy.
Also worth noting are Mary Steenburgen who played Nixon's mother, and Bob Hoskins who played J. Edgar Hoover. Steenburgen seemed the very embodiment of the wise and hardtack Quaker mother while Hoskins's sleazy lampoon of Hoover was creepy enough to make your skin crawl.
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