RiverDog wrote:I've seen enough of Oliver Stone's revisionist history works, and I refuse to reward his efforts by paying to see his trash. His crowning achievement, JFK, was the most outrageous attempt to inflame public opinion that I've ever witnessed, mixing in fictional scenes done in grainy black and white to match actual historical footage to give the audience the impression that it really happened, completely and intentionally misrepresented known facts, and made a hero out of a lunatic. "Nixon" was another POS of his. He had Pat Nixon threatening to divorce RN unless he came clean about Watergate, something that by every single account of those who knew them best never came close to happening. Richard Nixon was a lot of things, but he and his wife were in love every minute of their lives until the day they were parted by death, not even a rumor of an extramarital affair, something that a number of POTUS over the past 70 years cannot claim. I also didn't appreciate him putting a Brit in the role of an American president.
That's interesting viewpoint RD. I enjoyed JFK and recommend it. You are correct that Oliver Stone movie introduced some narrative that was pure speculation on events that no one could know about - he does this to fill in the gaps between the facts that are historically accepted about the assassination of JFK - so yes the movie as a whole should not be accepted as a 100% historical documentary - but it is a very thoughtful and excellent movie.
On Nixon portrayal - I disagree - I thought it was an excellent movie and I don't think any histroical figure would object to one of the all time great actors - Antony Hopkins - as portraying them.
Oliver Stone was actually critically attacked by the "Liberal Elites" over this movie - the felt that Stone had made Nxon into to sympathetic a character in the movie - at the end of the movie you feel that you have viewed a very human story and not a simpleton attack piece that so many people wish the Nixon movie would have been.
Below is the 4 star review of Oliver Stone "Nixon" from the All time great Roger Ebert:
>>>>Oliver Stone's "Nixon" gives us a brooding, brilliant, tortured man, sinking into the gloom of a White House under siege, haunted by the ghosts of his past. Thoughts of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear come to mind; here, again, is a ruler destroyed by his fatal flaws.
There's something almost majestic about the process: As Nixon goes down in this film, there is no gloating, but a watery sigh, as of a great ship sinking.
The movie does not apologize for Nixon, and holds him accountable for the disgrace he brought to the presidency. But it is not without compassion for this devious and complex man, and I felt a certain empathy: There, but for the grace of God, go we. I rather expected Stone, the maker of "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers," to adopt a scorched-earth policy toward Nixon, but instead he blames not only Nixon's own character flaws but also the Imperial Presidency itself, the system that, once set in motion, behaves with a mindlessness of its own.
In the title role, Anthony Hopkins looks and sounds only generally like the 37th president. This is not an impersonation; Hopkins gives us a deep, resonant performance that creates a man instead of imitating an image. Stone uses the same approach, reining in his stylistic exuberance and yet giving himself the freedom to use flashbacks, newsreels, broadcast voices, montage and the device of clouds swiftly fleeing over the White House sky as events run ahead of the president's ability to control them.
"Nixon" is flavored by the greatest biography in American film history, "Citizen Kane." There are several quotes, such as the opening upward pan from outside the White House fence, the gothic music on a cloudy night, the "March of Time"-style newsreel, and the scene where the president and Mrs. Nixon sit separated by a long dinner table. The key device that Stone has borrowed is the notion of "Rosebud," the missing piece of information that might explain a man's life.
In Stone's view, the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap on the White House tapes symbolizes a dark hole inside the president's soul, a secret that Nixon hints at but never reveals. What is implied is that somehow a secret CIA operation against Cuba, started with Nixon's knowledge during the last years of the Eisenhower administration, turned on itself and somehow led to the assassination of John F.
Kennedy.
The movie doesn't suggest that Nixon ordered or desired Kennedy's death, but that he half-understood the process by which the "Beast," as he called the secret government apparatus, led to the assassination. Learning that former CIA Cuba conspirator E. Howard Hunt was involved in the Watergate caper, he murmurs, "He's the darkness reaching out for the dark. Open up that scab, you uncover a lot of pus." And in an unguarded moment, he confides to an aide, "Whoever killed Kennedy came from this thing we created - this Beast." If the 18 1/2-minute gap conceals Rosebud, it is like the Rosebud in "Kane," explaining nothing, but pointing to a painful hole in the hero's psyche, created in childhood. "Nixon" shows the president's awkward, unhappy early years, as two brothers die, and his strict Quaker parents fill him with a sense of purpose and inadequacy. "When you quit struggling, they've beaten you," his father says. And his mother (Mary Steenburgen), speaking in the Quaker tradition of thees and thous, seems always to hold him to a higher standard than he can hope to reach.
Stone, who was burned by accusations that some of the history in "JFK" was fabricated, opens with the disclaimer that some scenes are based on hypothesis and speculation. Many of the scenes, in fact, come out of our memory book of Nixon's greatest hits: the Checkers speech, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore"; the summit with Mao; the bizarre midnight visit with anti-war protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, and the strange scene, reported in Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days, in which a crushed president asks Henry Kissinger to join him on his knees in prayer.
One theme throughout the film is Nixon's envy of John F. Kennedy. He judges his entire life in terms of his nemesis. Nixon on JFK's 1960 campaign: "All my life he's been sticking it to me. Now he steals from me." Nixon, bitter at not being invited by Kennedy's family to JFK's funeral, reflecting half-enviously: "If I'd been president, they never would have killed me." Nixon, alone at the end, speaking to the portrait of JFK: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are." Stone has surrounded his Nixon with a gallery of figures we remember from the Watergate years, played by actors of a uniformly high caliber. Bob Hoskins creates a feral, poisonous J. Edgar Hoover, eating melon from the mouth of a handsome pool boy and ogling the Marine guards at a White House reception. Paul Sorvino plays Kissinger, reserved, watchful, disbelieving as he gets down on his knees to pray. J. T. Walsh and James Woods are Ehrlichman and Haldeman, the inner guard, carefully monitoring the nuances between what is said and what is implied. Powers Boothe is the impeccable Alexander Haig, who firmly guides the president toward resignation.
When Nixon ponders a cover-up of the tapes, it is Haig who raises the (imaginary?) possibility that backup copies might surface. Notice the precision of his wording: "I know for a fact that it's possible that there was another tape." The key supporting performance in the movie, however, is by Joan Allen as Pat Nixon. She emerges as strong-willed and clear-eyed, a truth-teller who sees through Nixon's masks and evasions. She is sick of being a politician's wife. Their daughters, she says, know Nixon only from television. More than anyone else in the film, she supplies the conscience.
"Nixon" would be a great film even if there had been no Richard Nixon. In its control of mood and personality, in the way the president musters moments of brilliance even as the circle closes, in the way it shows advisers huddled terrified in the corridors of power, it takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. Tragedy requires the fall of a hero, and one of the achievements of "Nixon" is to show that greatness was within his reach.
Aristotle advises that the listener to a tragic tale will "thrill with horror and melt with pity." Yes, and so we do, because Nixon was right about his life: The cards were stacked against him, even though he dealt most of them himself.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/nixon-1995