Nixon (1995)

  I was really impressed with Oliver Stone's JFK so I thought I'd give his other presidential treatment a chance.  Turns out, I don't know nearly enough about the Nixon administration to be able to enjoy this movie.

I know some stuff.  Mostly from other movies like All the President's Men.  This only briefly touches on Watergate, however, covering from the late 60's through his resignation.  Since all of this happened before I was born, I did not have a firm grasp on who everyone was supposed to be so most of the characters meant nothing.

Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) rose from a poor Quaker family in California to Vice President of the U.S. under Dwight Eisenhower.  He lost the bid for President to John F. Kennedy and then the California gubernatorial election, after which he promised his wife, Pat (Joan Allen), that he was done with politics.  They were not done with him, however.  After JFK's assassination, Nixon is persuaded to run again by some Texas businessmen, led by Jack Jones (Larry Hagman), who are dissatisfied by the current state of affairs.  He had previously campaigned under a tirade of fear and Communist paranoia spurred by his contemporary, Joseph McCarthy, and employed those same tactics to leverage his way into the White House, despite an almost pathological unlikeability.  Nixon became dangerously paranoid himself, and had every conversation in the Oval Office recorded, a fact which would later bite him in the ass.

It took me three days to watch this movie and I felt like it should have come with a companion history book.  That being said, Oliver Stone is a hell of a film-maker.  The acting is interspersed with actual news footage from the time, which is usually a tired gimmick, but here really does make it feel like it's part of the historical tapestry.  You can't really tell from the poster but Anthony Hopkins nailed the Nixon look.  He doesn't sound like him and the nose is wrong, but the mannerisms and sweaty skeeviness are dead on.  As good as he is, though, Paul Sorvino is absolutely amazing as Kissinger.  I totally didn't recognize him.  Every one else (and there are a ton of famous people in this) looks exactly the way that they always do, which made it even harder on me.  I didn't know who they were supposed to be, so it was hard not to think of them as just themselves.  Like, I don't know who Alexander Haig is, so now I think Powers Boothe was Nixon's right-hand-man.  Ditto for James Woods and David Hyde Pierce.  That probably makes me an idiot, but I'm ok with that.