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A Decade after 9/11

Flashbacks

Dicked over

Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon in Nixon

The film begins and ends, as does the history of America in the last half-century, with Watergate. All the details chronicled and parodied at length –which are now almost ions of American folklore—are in place: Nixon (Anthony Hopkins, who neither looks nor sounds much lik Nixon but whose bearish, cringing presence is exactly suitable) sloshing scotch in his darkened office as the fireplace and air conditioner run full blast; sinister Alexander Haig (Powers Boothe) skulking in with a tape for the president’s perusal; the obscenities and yelps of self pity as Nixon reprises the fatal conferences he foolishly and vaingloriously recorded. What is missing, though, is the acrimony and black humor that invariably accompanies these images. Perhaps because he showed his limitations in that department with Natural Born Killers, Stone in Nixon foregoes satire for tragedy.

Not that he’s avoiding humor altogether. From the opening scene, this Nixon evokes more the fearful comedy of Beckett’s Krapp than the unabashed, unexplained evil of Nixon’s namesake in Shakespeare’s Richard III (soon to be released in a wacky, postmodern adaptation with Ian McKellen, which could serve as a sequel of Stone’s film). As the voices spin from the reel and the camera closes in on the gears and sprockets of the tape recorder, Nixon is drawn back into the flashbacks within flashbacks of his past only to discover a weaving of words, egos, and delusion that disclose not a tragic flaw but a tragic void.

Stone, regrettably, tries his hand at psychoanalyzing. What he offers is nothing new (he might have taken a hint from Robert Coover’s endearingly benighted Nixon in the Public Burning, or the shriveled soul exposed in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor). Nixon had a Kennedy complex: everything he was and did failed by comparison with the leader of Camelot. Jack was rich; Dick was poor. Jack went to Harvard; Dick went to Whittier. Jack slept with countless women; Dick married Pat. Jack was loved; Dick was elected. As Nixon himself says to his predecessor’s portrait by the end of the film, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”