Nixon

365 Films

Entry #101

Nixon (1996)

Directed by Oliver Stone

I’m sure eyes rolled and exasperated sighs were released the instant Oliver Stone announced his gargantuan 1996 presidential bio-pic epic Nixon was to be his next film.  So tarnished was Mr. Stone’s reputation with respect to his ability of putting “truthful” things on screen that the prospect of an even-handed treatment of (at the time) this country’s most controversial president seemed faint at best.  Perhaps it is Mr. Stone’s reputation as a cinematic muckraker that makes Nixon such a satisfying and compulsively watchable piece of historical storytelling.  In not merely settling for a hit job, but instead plumbing Mr. Nixon’s psychological depths as a figure of Greek tragedy, Mr. Stone made a film that is as perhaps how his subject would have made it.  Or maybe the better way of putting it would be to say this is the film Nixon would have made in his subconscious.  Largely sticking to the bio-pic structural tropes (tracing Nixon’s life from boy-hood to resignation), Nixon employs some of the same stylistic visual tics as Mr. Stone’s 1991 masterpiece JFK such as varying film stocks and whiplash inducing jumps from past to present and from a cinematic reality to a sort of paranoid induced fever dream.  Perhaps the most brilliant touch in all of Nixon is that is attempts to put the viewer as much inside its subject’s head as it possibly can.  That is to say, Mr. Stone allows us the distance to see the cripplingly flawed man at the center while simultaneously inducing our empathy for him.  That’s not to say the film lets him off the hook for anything that he did, only that it’s quite possible that life would be hell for anybody with the raging amount of bullshit that the man had bouncing around inside his head.  Nixon was one of those films that I studiously avoided upon its initial release.  To this day, I can’t quite figure out why that was because I was definitely a huge fan of JFK and this seemed to be in a similar vein.  I was perhaps scared off by what most people were scared off by, and that is the 3 hour plus run time of the picture.  The extended director’s cut or whatever you’d like to call it runs nearly four hours long.  Luckily, my brother was all-together obsessed with it when it came out and his reports back about all the crazy historical shit implied by the film just made it that much more frustrating that I skipped its theatrical release.  With detail-by-detail precision, I can remember my brother describing the scene to me where it is all but spelled out that Nixon but tacitly approved of the Kennedy assassination.  Call it irresponsible filmmaking or absolute bullshit but I was already enthralled.   It was much to my amazement that when I finally caught up with the film, I was astonished by how much it moved and what operatic power it yielded with dynamic strength.  I remember trying to tell somebody at work that the run time goes by in the snap of a finger, like a perpetual motion machine.  In an era when we have become unfortunately far too accustomed to lightweight, disposable, and paint by number biographies, Nixon still lands like a punch to the gut. 

PS 

You definitely need to watch the theatrical trailer.  It's really something else.