oliver stone '85-'05 marathon - film 9 (previous: natural born killers <- -> next: u-turn) stone was one of the first directors i started following, as he was making dynamic, impactful movies right when i was old enough to start picking films apart and not just escaping into them. i'm well familiar with most of his major films, but this one was the last one i had never seen. i'm not sure why exactly...maybe for my friends and i, it was overshadowed by "heat" and "four rooms" (released about the same time)? or maybe it was the 3+ hour runtime, or the subject matter feeling well-trod, or just feeling like a comedown from the vibrancy of nbk... regardless, i never caught up with this one, and it's actually hard to recommend even now... i mean, is it possible for a director to be miscast? the problem with stone doing a biopic on richard nixon is, if he shows in great detail how vile nixon was and how much damage he did to the us, then it's predictable. that would be on-brand for 1995 oliver stone. if he tries to humanize nixon and take his point of view, it's much more interesting, but it's a huge leap to get oliver stone into that actor's headspace where they talk about no villain believing they're a villain. actors will all the time talk about characters believing they're the protagonists of their own stories, seeing all their actions as justified, and that's their mission. stone actually leans towards that here, but he can't really pull it off. he ends up waffling between showing how vile nixon was and yet also trying to have nixon provide reasonable justifications, as if things just got out of hand but were part of a rational series of events. there are many times where neither effort comes off convincingly. stone is a director who started as a writer of very successful movies. his scripts had great audience appeal, and most of his first directorial efforts did, too. where professional critics might sometimes accuse stone of being heavy-handed, audiences really responded to those same elements in films like the doors or nbk. critics had started to turn on the provocateur at this point, but then he swung back the other direction and made (in some ways) his most traditional stab ever at a big oscar drama. most critics were very high on nixon, but it didn't find much of an audience, and the director's cut re-release is even worse. this version is 28 minutes longer (a ponderous 212-minute total length), and most of that is due to two long scenes being re-instated. one is a scene where bob hoskins' glowering j. edgar hoover convinces nixon to put the recording system in the oval office. it's a scene that serves the narrative of the film, but honestly it just doubles down on this obvious caricature of hoover as almost a bond villain. i think hoskins is miscast here, firstly, but secondly the script uses hoover in really ham-fisted ways, and here is no exception. like "only an even bigger, more ruthless villain could ultimately be responsible for nixon's downfall." the second scene is really bad though: an epic-length diatribe from cia director richard helms (played by sam waterston) right in the middle of the film. this meeting with nixon is nearly 20-minutes long and just grinds the film to a halt, bogged down in theorizing with a flat delivery and no obvious theme. i think stone meant to do something like in jfk with donald sutherland's show-stealing epic monologue at the turning point of that film. but he and waterston just don't pull off that miracle here. these issues are representative of the film in general. i don't think it knows what it wants to be. an indictment of nixon's ideology? a portrayal of how he impacted the country? a biography of what made him tick? a rise-fall-rise-fall narrative? it's all over the place, and not helped by often flashing back and forward in chronology early in the film, without much of a sense of how these scenes are thematically-linked. stone's script is searching for something here, a driving force behind the man which is relatable to others, maybe. sort of like george lucas trying to get us to understand how darth vader became evil, to make him a villain you understand, even if you don't agree with. but like lucas' prequel efforts, the connective tissue just isn't all there. there's a little kid you can identify with, then a young man experiencing hard times, but suddenly we've got a guy slaughtering younglings without a care (and i wish that was just a metaphor). stone doesn't find the connective tissue. and maybe he shouldn't have even tried. not every villain needs to be humanized. not all points of view are equal. sometimes people just genuinely crave power and do 'smell their own farts', so to speak. do we as an audience need to be given all the facts of nixon's politicking, and then "see where he's coming from"? i don't think so. not that he never did anything good, but he is ultimately one of the us' worst villains. he tore apart of the fundamental fabric of the soul of the american people. there's just no identifying with nixon's point of view unless you're a similarly horrible person. and the script spends too much time taking stabs at this fruitless effort. but i think stone's heart just isn't in it. he tries to have characters spout justifications for things that are clearly laid out in very structured-for-an-audience arguments, not as actual conversations. but he can't resist wedging in little barbed comments that show the immorality and hypocrisy at the core of many of these people. stone's real p.o.v. bleeds through. he's trying to make this a counterpoint to jfk, but he often veers into making a sequel to scarface. stone also can't resist continuing to comment on jfk's assassination and build his conspiracy theory. now, i'm someone who believes he did a fantastic job with that earlier film, and i really respect the amount of research and interviews he incorporated into the script for that movie. but here, he's just throwing shit at the walls. there's a lot of wild speculation about what role nixon and the cia and a cabal of texas-based illuminati may've had in kennedy's assassination. both of them. and mlk, and the shooting of george wallace. the suggestion in this film is that a path was cleared for nixon to ascend to power and keep it. whereas the conspiracy theorizing in jfk was supported by reams and reams of evidence and decades of work, the speculation here is really the stuff of movies, and it's honestly distracting from everything else stone is trying to do in the film. like in his later film, "w.", stone veers into excusing nixon by showing him as a sometimes victim of circumstance and more powerful, shadowy people. it seems even more trite and insincere here than in that later film. in fact, many of the elements of this film are distracting. typical strengths of stone's films up to this point were the people he worked with, especially the many actors and composers. on jfk, john williams had done some amazing work, however it's a much more muddled result here, mostly reflecting various shades of "ominous". similarly, many of the supporting performances of generally quite-good character actors end up being too one-note here, and too dialed-up. they're almost caricatures rather than characters. mary steenburgen's stilted religious language is so forced as nixon's mother, not to mention corey carrier as the young nixon. i've recently been watching him as the youngest indiana jones, and he's simply another one of these cute kid actors who can't pull off the dialogue anakin skywalker paul sorvino's henry kissinger is right on the verge of camp, and some of the protestors (like at the lincoln memorial) are just not capable of obscuring the fact that this dialogue is written for the director to make a point, not because anyone would actually say it. "the (political) system is like a wild animal you can't tame..." despite there being plenty to cringe at here, there are impressive performances, too. ed harris as the head "plumber" at watergate steals the whole show with a cameo. i don't know if joan allen does a good pat nixon, but she acts the hell out of this film, that's for sure. the iconic larry hagman turns in a layered role i didn't know he even had in him, and james woods just kills it...with as much range as he's given to work with. and then there's hopkins himself. he looks basically nothing like nixon, and yet manages to do an impressive version of him through voice and posture and mannerisms. it never verges on an impression, and is always interesting. that said, there were times were i felt it (like other performances in the film) was too big, too obvious, and became hammy and distracting. no fault of hopkins; this is where the director needs to tell the actors to dial it back for the shot that he's using. i rarely got the sense here that stone ever dialed anything back. perhaps he was worried that his 3+ hour drama would lose tension and get boring, so he populated it with large performative moments and some dialogue that attempts to expound points directly. in jfk, he managed the feat, keeping the momentum, holding audience interest, clearly elucidating the central thesis of the film, and promoting some big, interesting performances. however, he doesn't manage that here. i think the main difficulty of the film is that it doesn't have a central rallying point like in jfk. (and i'm sorry to keep making the comparison, but in the commentary for that film, stone himself called it his "godfather...and nixon is my godfather part ii.") jfk starts with the assassination and then explores what led to that, gradually building up to the courtroom scene where the whole argument of the film is laid out. it is both a narrative and thematic vindication for the movie, where both stone and the main character get to make a stand. there's a half-hearted attempt to turn nixon's private oval office recordings into the same type of rallying point here. the movie starts with him listening to them, then asks why he made them, then returns to them at the end as the smoking gun that forces him to resign. but much of the center of the film feels far away from all that, a meandering trip through various events and themes, from the importance for nixon to always tell the truth, to his wanting to be popular, to his feeling intimidated by jfk, his love of football, his supposed inability to give up, and so on. there are so many themes being crammed in, the end result is more bloated than this review. this is, i think, the moment where stone's career firmly shifts. he was making progressively more-sprawling and ambitious films, and fighting more and more with studios about cut and structure and release. nixon got a very modest release with a 3+ hour cut. i'm sure with all the star power involved (hopkins was at the height of his critical and popular admiration!) stone could easily have gotten a huge release if he just came up with a cut near 2 hours. jettison all the jfk speculation, cut much of the flashbacks, focus on a biopic with the watergate tapes as a framing device.... but i suppose that would've been too conventional, and stone wasn't interested. still, i can't say that the film he ended up making was particularly less-conventional or more interesting. the editors are very capable, but very reined-in for much of this. the cinematography by bob richardson is fine, but i can't say that his efforts to lend darkness and oppression to scenes really pay off that well. the production design is quite good, but like these other factors, just really gets overshadowed by large performances and unwieldy dialogue. it's a very mixed bag that i was happy to see, but don't think i'll revisit anytime soon. high production value, but low entertainment value, and very low value as any kind of real historical examination. watch frost/nixon instead.