Overlooked Movies: Nixon

I'm going to use my blog frequently to dole out hidden gems and other overlooked movies. I'm a movie freak. Every year I attend Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign-Urbana at the U of Illinois. He chooses about a dozen movies that are overlooked in some kind of way, and it's been there that I discover some really wonderful movies like Shotgun Stories which is now in limited release.

I thought it would be perfect to pick a political film as the first one to recommend here, and indeed I've chosen Oliver Stone's Nixon.

It was nominated for a few Oscars, but with a running time of over 3 hours, made little money at the box office. And amid the great movies that Stone has made, including Platoon, Wall Street, Born On the 4th of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers, Nixon is the one that I think the least amount of people have seen.

It's such a great movie. I've now seen it about 6 or 7 times, and on the most recent viewing, my friends and I were astonished by how entertaining it is, too. Anthony Hopkins plays Nixon and Joan Allen plays his wife Pat. We follow Nixon through many of his "signature" moments, including the "Checkers" speech he gave as VP nominee under Eishenhower, the "I'm not a crook" speech, and in a very well edited debate sequence against JFK.

What's surprising about Nixon is how fair it is with the man, and how much empathy Oliver Stone brings to the guy. There is an amazing scene where Nixon steps out of the White House one night and goes to the Lincoln memorial and talks to some "hippies". He's confronted by a young woman who challenges him on his war policy, and Nixon admits that what he's really trying to do in office is to "tame the beast". The girl says to him, "it's all bigger than you isn't it? It's like it's out of your hands". Nixon looks on in silence. This is one of the great themes of the movie; that the occupant of the Oval Office has potentially become drowned out in a system that now bigger than anyone one person can handle.

Anthony Hopkins would seem to be a curious choice to play Nixon, but he's just about perfect. We see a man who opened relations with China, began to make peace with Russia, and was a centrist on social policies. But we also see, unblinkingly, how Nixon dealt with the power that was granted him, and how he descended into paranoia and finally abused his power.

There are a multitude of fine performances the whole way, from J.T. Walsh and James Woods as Nixon advisers, to Joan Allen who plays Pat, to Bob Hoskins who plays J. Edgar Hoover.

The movie was criticized by some even before they had seen it as an attack on Nixon, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Nixon weaves together a great tapestry of Americana and politics, strategy and power, and election campaigning. But more than that, it plays like Shakespeare; we're reminded here especially of MacBeth and Hamlet.

When I grew up, I was simply lead to believe that Nixon was a bad guy and a "crook". After watching this movie, I feel like I understand the man so much more clearly. And then when you look at the rest of his policies, you begin to understand just how great he could've been.