Anthony Hopkins electrifies the screen as Nixon in the acclaimed hit from controversial director Oliver Stone. Nominated for four Academy Awards(R), including best actor, Anthony Hopkins, 1995, Nixon takes a riveting look at a complex man whose chance at greatness was ultimately destroyed by his passion for power, when his involvement in conspiracy jeopardized the nation's security and the presidency of the United States. With a phenomenal all-star cast featuring Ed Harris, James Woods and Joan Allen, Nixon is a powerful motion picture. Included in this special Election Year Edition is an all-new 35-minute documentary on Nixon by Sean Stone you won't want to miss.

The truth is that NIXON is much more even-handed in its portrayal of the 37th President of the United States than I thought it could be. Anthony Hopkins gives a reasonably fair portrayal of Nixon, and Joan Allen is tremendous as his wife Pat. Although Stone's penchant for conspiracy does get the better of him at times, he sees Nixon as more a tragic victim than as an evil power-monger, a vision that is closer to the truth than what Nixon's enemies made him out to be in reality.

Stone wisely does not gloss over the simple facts about the man. Nixon was indisputably a great and cagey anticommunist politician who managed to split the Sino-Soviet communist alliance in two and thus promote stability in the Cold War world for years to come. But he left a lot to be desired as a human being, being paranoid, distrustful, deceitful, and, in the end, blatantly dishonest. In that sense, the saga of Richard Nixon ranks as the American equivalent of a Greek tragedy: so much explosive potential destroyed by scandal.

As in JFK, Stone has assembled a massive cast of people: Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, J.T. Walsh, and James Woods, just to name a few. Despite its few faults, NIXON is a fair portrait of perhaps the most frustrating and complicated man ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

9 of 10 found the following review helpful:


Oliver Stone's Richard the Third  Nov 29, 2004 By Dark Mechanicus JSG "Black Ops Teep"
Oliver Stone's "Nixon" isn't really the cinematic biography of American Commander-in-Chief and Paranoid Extraordinaire Richard M. Nixon, but more like a latter day "Richard III". Stone need only have given the ogrish Nixon (played fascinating and disturbingly by the gifted Anthony Hopkins) a hunchback and had him kill a few kids in the Tower of London to have completed the deal.

I am a big Nixon fan, if only for his strangeness, for his political eccentricity in a political system where only the bland, the smiling, the sound-biteable, the contempibly predictable is rewarded. Nixon, to me, has always seemed like an anachronistic creation of pure will, a force of random Brownian motion, a misunderstood Machiavellian demon, hopelessly paranoid, unmistakably brilliant, brutally deformed, unequivocally human, a misshapen creature.

Stone turns that on its head, and suggests that at worst Nixon may just have been naive. Driven, yes. Ambitious, yes. Duplicitous, only when it suited him. But naive. And that, truly, is the fascination with this lavish little probe into the mind and madness that was Richard Nixon, and the insanity that was the America he helmed. Oliver Stone's "Nixon" is flawed, oddly talky, features an impossibly gorgeous Joan Allen as the impossibly dowdy Pat Nixon. But with all that against it, it is compulsive. It is fascinating. It kept me up all night, for all 212 of its minutes (get the Director's cut). Can more be said?

Perhaps. Stone, who helmed "Natural Born Killers" and "Wall Street" and "JFK", is incapable of making a bad moviek, and "Nixon" is no exception. But like those other cinematic feats, Stone has a peculiar knack for glorifying his monsters: "Wall Street" became nothing so much as a Wall Street investment banking recruiting video for finance neophytes frothing at the mouth to become the next Gordon Gekko. "Natural Born Killers" made mass murder look sexy.

Same with "Nixon": far from a gnomish American Machiavelli, Nixon comes across as a sympathetic dupe, manipulated by his Quaker California youth, by his hopeless class insecurity, by the very real fear and lack of confidence made manifest in this sweating middle class creature, contrasted unseemingly with the sweatless WASP Prince John F. Kennedy.

"Nixon", then, is surprisingly sympathetic, a toxic stew of Nixon's paranoia and the insanity over which he ruled. Stone is a brilliant director, but he is capable of terrible stuff: here an editor is called for, and the team of Brian Berdan ("Mothman Prophecies") and Hank Corwin ("Natural Born Killers") cull the bad stuff while emphasizing the good. Director of Photography Robert Richardson, who loves MTV-quick cuts juxtaposed with ethereal, epic, jaw-dropping long shots (he has rolled out all of Stone's work---all of it!---"Natural Born Killers", "JFK", "Wall Street", "Platoon"---and gone on to helm both "Kill Bill" flicks as well as "Wag the Dog" and the lush Victorian "Four Feathers") does that voodoo he does so well.

Frankly, though, "Nixon" is an actor's movie. The acting is nearly uniformly superb, with the exception of Joan Allen (Pat Nixon, Nixon's dearly beloved), who was yummy to behold but totally failed the sniff test. Anthony Hopkins doesn't look a thing like Tricky Dick, but totally owns the movie and compels respect: and what a complicated role! James Woods does his thing as Haldeman, sneering and brooding the whole time. The late great J.T. Walsh brings up the rear as the crafty Erlichmann. David Hyde Pierce is nervous and spot-on as John Dean, though John Diehl is underwhelming as the legendary GG Liddy.

But again, this is an actor's Nirvana: Paul Sorvino as Kissinger (pure caricature)! Bob Hoskins as the cruel J. Edgar Hoover! Ed Harris as the murderous Howard Hunt! Uber-liberal Sam Waterston as the truly demonic (I mean truly demonic) Richard Helms (love the contacts, bro!). And best of all, the inimitable, tightly contained Powers Boothe as Alexander Haig, always in "charge here", always ready to blow. Did I mention the score is by John Williams? I didn't? It works (duh!).

"Nixon" is one of Stone's masterworks, easily rivalling "JFK" for pure consumptive paranoid entertainment. Absolute power may not corrupt absolutely, but it sure does entertain---absolutely.

6 of 6 found the following review helpful:


The Man We Loved to Hate  Jan 06, 2011 By Customer Formerly Known as Giordano Bruno
I'm an old hand at hating Richard Nixon. I had a head start over Oliver Stone at Nixon-hating; I was already adept at it in 1960, when Stone was just an early teenager. Stone's cinematic biography of Nixon insistently portrays Nixon himself as a Nixon-hater, the most ardent Nixon-hater of all, a man of painful insecurity, what radio/TV psychologists would call a victim of poor self image, verging on clinical paranoia. In fact, Stone's depiction of Nixon is remarkably sympathetic and multi-faceted. This fictionalized Nixon was, as the despicable fictionalized Henry Kissinger says, a man who had greatness in his grasp but who destroyed himself. The cast of accomplices and sycophants - all fictionalized of course - around Nixon during his presidency are uniformly lesser men, simpler in their evil, than he is: Haldeman is a cold-blooded apparatchik, the least troubled by ethics of the crew; Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean are uncomplicated placemen; Colson, Hunt, Hoover, Haig, and especially CIA Director Richard Helms are figures of Machiavellian evil. Surrounded by such a crew of villains, poor Richard Milhouse can honestly be perceived as 'a man more sinned against than sinning.'

Did you heed the word 'fictional' in that first paragraph? This film is a work of artistic interpretation, as much so as Shakespeare's Richard the Third or John Adams's opera Nixon in China. Most of the negative criticisms of the film have essentially denied the legitimacy of an artistic interpretation of 'current' events. The film was released in 1995, only twenty three years after the Watergate burglary-fiasco. Is that enough time to justify the use of Nixon as a 'dramatis persona' in what amounts to a modern Greek tragedy? All the themes of Aeschylus and Sophocles are here, fatal chance and hubris in abundance. Judged exclusively as a work of art, a theater piece intended to challenge the minds and emotions of an audience, Stone's "Nixon" seems to me to be a magnificent success. Anthony Hopkins is powerfully believable in the title role, just as he would be in the roe of Macbeth or Dumas's Richelieu. The collage cinematography - color mixed with black-and-white, flashbacks to Nixon's childhood, news photo realia blended with Stone's own footage - is superb. Joan Allen's portrayal of Pat Nixon was Oscar-worthy, and virtually any of the supporting cast of baddies might equally have been honored. In short, it's a potent piece of theatrical drama.

But there's still a nagging question of its 'historical' accuracy, much as we'd like to assert that history and art are different matters. Just how historically accurate is it? I'd suggest taking a look at other books, or merely at the Watergate article on wikipedia, if you're perturbed by that question. You'll find that Stone has hewn rather closely to the known facts of the events. What isn't known ... where the facts are vague... there Stone has freely asserted a controversial interpretation. The film implies that CIA attempts to 'eliminate' Fidel Castro were directly responsible for the assassination of JFK, or at least that Nixon labored under some fearful sense of guilt that such a responsibility was his. Stone does NOT explicitly endorse such a 'conspiracy' theory; he subtly shows Nixon agonizing over its consequences. Only the most fervent right-wing 'patriot' could deny that the CIA had gone 'rogue' in its several decades of covert operations. Stone's Nixon is helplessly aware of his inability to manage the "beast" of State; in full conscience, he both detests the CIA/FBI and depends on their complicity, in a "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" moral quandary.

Stone's ambiguous hero Nixon saw himself as a great president, an accomplisher, and he repeatedly lists his accomplishments: ending the draft; generously increasing Social security and SSI; diplomatic recognition of China and cautious arms reduction negotiations with the USSR; decreased military spending; some Keynesian measures of economic stabilization; effective support for desegregation, Civil Rights in general, and the ill-fated ERA; support for abortion rights, urged by his wife Pat; an impressive record of support for environmental protections; and above all, in his mind, "ending the war" in Vietnam with 'honor' by withdrawal under a guise of diplomacy. And Stone has his history right! In hindsight, Nixon was probably the best 'Democratic' president the Republicans ever elected. What his most fervent haters failed to realize was that "opportunism" is sometimes a synonym for "pragmatism." Nixon WAS a pragmatist for America, an opportunist for himself.

The dramatic climax of Nixon's career, and of this dramatization of it, was obviously Watergate, with the subsequent Constitutional turmoil and his eventual resignation. Again Oliver Stone got the basic known facts correct. His depictions of the unseen maneuvers of Nixon's staff, of his strife with Pat, and especially of Nixon's own agonistic psychological collapse are all 'artistic' liberties, speculative interpretations. Are Stone's insights legitimate? He has the art to make them seem plausible, and such artwork is/guesswork is intellectually legitimate as long as the viewer recognizes them as such. Once again in hindsight, Watergate was a paltry affair, a petty abuse of power that might have been applied to far more odious misdeeds. Stone's Nixon asserts that other presidents had pulled far sleazier stunts, used their power far more abusively, and in that he is surely accurate. Watergate was a molehill of a scandal compared to Ronald Reagan's outrageous Iran-Contra shenanigans, the most patently impeachment-worthy abuses of any president in history. But Nixon was 'hated' as vehemently as Reagan was loved. In that light, one might conclude that Nixon was fundamentally correct when he raged that 'it wasn't about the war or the nation, it was all about destroying him.' Oddly enough, Oliver Stone's Nixon isn't a cartoon monster after all; he's human enough not to be hated, although it would take an act of God to make me love him.

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