the
beasts within:
nixon
jumanji |
director
Oliver Stone
screenwriters
Stephen J. Rivele
Christopher Wilkinson
Oliver Stone
producers
Oliver Stone
Clayton Townsend
Andrew G. Vajna
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
John Williams
editors
Brian Berdan
Hank Corwin
cast
Anthony Hopkins (Richard M. Nixon)
Joan Allen (Pat Nixon)
Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig)
Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt)
Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover)
E.G. Marshall (John Mitchell)
David Paymer (Ron Ziegler)
David Hyde Pierce (John Dean)
Paul Sorvino (Henry Kissinger)
Mary Steenburgen (Hannah Nixon)
J.T. Walsh (John Ehrlichman)
James Woods (H. R. Haldeman)
Annabeth Gish (Julie Nixon)
Tony Goldwyn (Harold Nixon)
Larry Hagman ('Jack Jones')
Edward Herrmann (Nelson Rockefeller)
Madeline Kahn (Martha Mitchell)
Dan Hedaya (Trini Cardoza)
Tony Lo Bianco (Johnny Roselli)
Tony Plana (Manolo Sanchez)
Saul Rubinek (Herb Klein)
John Diehl (G. Gordon Liddy)
George Plimpton (President's Lawyer)
Marley Shelton (Tricia Nixon)
James Karen (Bill Rogerson)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 192m
u.s.
release: 12/20/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other oliver
stone films
reviewed on this website:
- alexander
- any given sunday
- natural born killers
- u-turn
- world trade center
Other Joe
Johnston films
reviewed on this site:
- Jurassic
Park 3
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Something strange happens during
Oliver Stone's Nixon, and it's not just that ex-president
Richard Nixon -- figure of evil, target of ridicule -- emerges
as a real, suffering human being. It's that the man, his life,
and the movie itself merge, as in some unholy trinity, and pull
together the themes Stone has underlined throughout his career:
the twin decline of American conscience and American consciousness.
Stone's recent films, particularly Heaven and Earth and
Natural Born Killers, seemed to
me to express a dark self-disgust. I assumed the self-disgust
was Stone's, but now, with Nixon -- which drips with Tricky
Dick's self-loathing -- Stone's message becomes clear. America
hates itself; our country is on a suicidal guilt trip, and has
been, perhaps, since Hiroshima. Nixon, the bitter mama's boy
who clutched at the American dream, was a perversely apt leader
for this nation in its hour of seething chaos. Some of Nixon
is crude, much is factually (and dramatically) slippery, and
Stone is still too pushy and insistent. Yet this is still, I
think, the great neglected American film of 1995: philosophical
and experimental, wounded and impassioned -- a fragmented epic
of the psyche.
At first glance, Anthony Hopkins hardly seems an obvious or even
a good choice to play Nixon. My heart sank when I saw the early
photos of Hopkins wearing the familiar Nixon haircut but otherwise
resembling him no more than I do. But looks aren't everything.
Sometimes, from certain angles -- especially when he activates
his wolfish fake grin -- Hopkins does look startlingly like Nixon,
or at least like Hopkins possessed by Nixon's ghost. And really
that's what the performance is. Hopkins digs deep, drawing on
his own reserves of self-doubt (how to play such a well-known,
well-parodied man?), and brings back Nixon's burned-out, paranoid
soul -- his eternal, essential loneliness, the resentment and
neediness and grief beneath the impenetrable shell. In public,
Hopkins' Nixon puts on his Nixon mask. In private, his stubbly
features collapse. He becomes a raging, depressive id, an exposed
nerve.
We know all this, of course. Nixon's bizarre psyche became common
knowledge with the Woodward-Bernstein books, and Saturday
Night Live wasted no time jumping on the abject Nixon-Kissinger
prayer anecdote in The Final Days. In retrospect, Nixon
was not so much a monstrous or tragic figure as a cautionary
one -- less a Richard III than a lumpen Macbeth, a pathetic man
consumed by his own naked ambition. Helplessly, he brought shame
upon his country, his office, himself. What Nixon illustrates
so indelibly is that the shame festered in him from the start.
Two of Nixon's brothers died of tuberculosis, freeing up some
money his parents used to send him to law school. But that school
was Whittier, not "the right school" -- i.e., Harvard,
which birthed Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Nixon's drive to power,
according to Stone, was ambiguous and vengeful. Deprived of the
American royalty and telegenic suavity of the brothers Kennedy,
he had to prove that he, Richard Nixon, could transcend anything,
could "keep fighting." In the movie, when Nixon assumes
the presidency, he becomes a rigid man, a rusty flagpole that
won't bend in the hot winds of change. Yet he also craves popular
acceptance. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown of thorns.
In Nixon, Stone introduces "the Beast" (in Natural
Born Killers it was "the Demon"), a catch-all mystical
boogeyman that apparently symbolizes the primal chaos and violence
of human nature, the collective American id. Like JFK,
Nixon posits a military-industrial Beast, fed by corrupt
tycoons and Cuban interests. James Ellroy, in his kaleidoscopic
novel American Tabloid (which reads like a jazz riff on
JFK), swam through this same sewage without slapping a
fancy Biblical name on it. At times, Stone's Beast is as silly
a straw man as Bob Dole's media violence or Bill Clinton's Joe
Camel. Two examples: the scenes in Nixon when Nixon butts
heads with callous, shadowy big-wigs (among them Larry Hagman,
doing a tumorous variation on J.R. Ewing) play like special pleading.
"See," Stone is saying, "Nixon stood up to these
guys, but there was only so much he could do without getting
popped like JFK." And there's a terrible scene, set days
after the Kent State massacre, in which Nixon confronts young
protesters in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon tries ingratiating
himself by talking football -- that part is fine. But then a
pretty young student asks Nixon why he doesn't stop the fighting
in Vietnam. Perhaps having read the script, she concludes, "You
couldn't stop it if you wanted to." Shaken, Nixon walks
to his limo convinced that the student has put her finger on
the Beast that forces his hand.
Stone doesn't need this mythology. Most of Nixon paints
a stark portrait of a rougher Beast -- the Beast in Nixon and,
by extension, the Beast in us. Stylistically, Nixon is
the third panel in Stone's shattered-glass American triptych,
begun by JFK and continued in Natural Born Killers,
whose Cuisinart style was itself the subject. In form, Nixon
is far from the usual biopic. It hops from decade to decade,
from style to style, as if trying to reconcile the scattered
pieces of Nixon's soul, the schizophrenia of a life lived under
a magnifying glass. The effect is less trippy than free-associative.
Stone is collecting the jagged shards of what we know about Nixon
and gluing them into a cracked mirror on America. "When
they look at you," Nixon mutters to a painting of JFK, "they
see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what
they are." The editing (by Brian Berdan and Hank Corwin,
Stone's NBK team) strobes us subliminally into complicity
with Nixon. We share his experience; we swim around inside his
head.
If we're never with him all the way -- if our understanding is
aesthetic instead of compassionate, if we observe his fall with
pity rather than with empathy -- that's because Nixon finally
blocks us out just as stubbornly as he shuts out everyone else.
The glimpses of raw, anguished need that Hopkins flashes us are
more than enough. Nixon is about a frozen man burning
in shame, refusing to let himself melt in the heat. In the end,
he isn't broken -- he's splintered, like the film itself. The
Beast may have left Nixon, but Oliver Stone assures us that it
will always fiddle while America burns.
 The first and last sections of Jumanji
are the sorriest excuses for set-up and resolution I've ever
seen in a produced script. Jumanji is based on a brisk,
haunting children's book (by Chris Van Allsberg) whose premise
was storybook simple: What if some kids playing a mysterious
board game unleashed hordes of wild animals? (It's like Pandora's
Box by way of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," crossed
with a Ouija board.) The movie, directed by Joe Johnston (The
Rocketeer) and written by Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor,
and Jim Strain, doesn't trust its premise. No, it has to invent
a backstory concerning a dejected little boy, ignored by his
cold father and bullied at school, who gets sucked into Jumanji
back in 1969 and pops out 26 years later as Robin Williams --
who still has a daddy complex despite surviving in the jungle
for decades. (There's a psychotic British hunter in Jumanji who's
a ringer for Dad. He has a big gun.) Trying to control the wild
kingdom sprouting from the board game, Williams gets help from
two other parentless kids (Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce)
as well as his now-grown-up childhood sweetheart (Bonnie Hunt),
who must spell out the movie's subtext: the stampeding beasts,
and Jumanji itself, are manifestations of Williams' repressed
anger at Dad. Freudians should have a field day with Jumanji:
It's full of phallic/vaginal perils, plus constant images of
cathartic violation. The animals, demolishing suburban propriety,
are primal therapists.
At the end, Williams is restored to his 1969 boy-self, reconciles
with Dad, and grows up to marry Bonnie. He's learned that being
a man means being in touch with your feelings -- with your inner
child. (Didn't he already learn this in Hook?) Jumanji
is half an awful movie, but the other half -- the middle section,
in which the computer-generated beasts go ballistic -- is often
startling and pleasurably scary. A freewheeling director like
Sam Raimi might have chucked the inner-child nonsense, stuck
with the basic idea of animals on the rampage, and made a romp
for the inner brat in us all.
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