Oliver Stone has spent much of his career chronicling American failure, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he would make a movie about a spectacularly failed American president. What is surprising is Nixon’s efforts to humanize Richard Nixon, who—one assumes—is on the opposite end of the political spectrum as Stone. Yet that’s the defining quality of the movie, written by Stone, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson. Relying heavily on flashbacks to Nixon’s hardscrabble youth under stern parents, we get a pop-psychology portrait of a man who never felt loved, even by those who voted for him, resulting in increasingly desperate political machinations to gain and maintain the power he felt he deserved. Anthony Hopkins, in the title role, gives a wide-ranging performance, capturing the real Nixon’s cadences while swinging for Shakesearean eloquence on occasion. (“Where would we be without death?” he muses at one point, cast in the shadows of Robert Richardson’s gloomy cinematography.) Without its central performance, Nixon would be an overlong assembly of Stone’s usual concerns and tactics: Vietnam and John F. Kennedy’s assassination are revisited via varying film stocks and near-subliminal editing, both to less pointed effect than in JFK. With Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, James Woods as H.R. Haldeman, J.T. Walsh as John Ehrlichman, and Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger.
