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Rating: WASHINGTON, 1970
It is four in the morning. The ruler of the Empire, Richard W. Nixon, climbs the steps of the Lincoln Memorial until he reaches the towering white statue of Abraham Lincoln. A hippie girl spending the night in the gigantic Neo-Greek temple, along with many other young protesters, approaches him unhesitatingly. Her words are those that will remain etched in the mind of America's sovereign: "He's like a wild animal".
"What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?" Matthew 16:26
Talking today about a work like the one Oliver Stone courageously staged at a moment, the early Nineties, when American dominance was already beginning to drift away from its fierce, tumultuous, and dark splendor, and just a moment before the most bloody and spectacular attack of all time irreparably undermined its foundations, is perhaps the worst way to come to terms with a history, the Western one, that is spiraling into a terrifying irrational vortex.
Never truly appreciated, neither by critics nor by the public, unreasonably compared to the now-classic "JFK", the hallucinatory and dizzying film in which Oliver Stone chisels the portrait of the most controversial protagonist of recent American history, besides representing one of the most important cinematic moments of the late Twentieth century, provides an unusual key to interpretation for the few, unfortunately, daring individuals who question the fate of a world on fire, in full decline, starved by an orgiastic craving for plunder and bacchanals, where the only concern seems to be saving what can be saved not of the soul, but of one’s grotesque shell.
An extreme and refined Anthony Hopkins is entrusted with Richard Milhous Nixon, the man before the politician, the husband and father even before the president, in an extraordinarily perfect performance, lucid and mad, controlled and exacerbated, a striking personification of the monarch of a most powerful nation, a kingdom in decay, which in those years directed the destiny of millions of men, forever changing the course of humanity. Because yes, beyond the film itself, Oliver Stone's greatest merit is not so much in having scoured and reconstructed the story of a debated, contested, and controversial character like the 37th President of the United States, but in having done so in the only possible way: narrating his events as if they were soporific and flaming acts of an ultramodern Shakespearean drama, soaked in blood, madness, and nightmares. Dismal and distorted, frenetic and dilated, obfuscated and illuminated, blurred and violated by the monumental symphonic power of the inimitable John Williams, the atmosphere is that of a sulfurous theatrical piece performed on the boundless stage of the real world.
Contributing to this visceral gigantic transposition was the choice of an exceptional cast, from Paul Sorvino's Machiavellian Henry Kissinger to the imposing General Alexander Haig played by Powers Boothe, from Ed Harris's cold and ruthless Everett Howard Hunt to Bob Hoskins's sordid Edgar J. Hoover, passing through James Woods to the magnificent performance of Joan Allen, a Pat Nixon surgically extracted from the truth.
But what strikes, because it borders on, indeed overwhelms, cinematography, is the analysis of the historical moment, the most violent period humanity remembers, that XX century stabbed by wars, exterminations, and destruction. It runs on the edge of art, the seventh, to touch the raw flesh of history and become a genuine work, not only an activity directed towards a purpose but also, and above all, of a spiritual and moral nature. It must have been difficult, if not impossible, to even think of narrating the dark side of a man like Richard Nixon, suspended between greatness and ignominy. The guilt for the death of his brothers, the lucid awareness of his own condition of origin. The cold illusion and the shattered pride. Knowing oneself feared, when not hated, never loved, by the Americans, or at best, by his wife, in perpetual wait in the claustrophobic vestibule of power.
One can define, or at least attempt to do so, honestly, without any preconceived notions, the figure of Richard W. Nixon in relation to the seismic succession of events that undermined his long political career, and beyond the ferocity and rabid madness: a sort of tyrant, more a despot than a president, obsessed with work and an insatiable hunger for power. Nonetheless, a shy and sensitive person, solitary, introverted, who - according to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger himself - to engage in politics had to act against his nature. An inner conflict that led him to a spectacular downfall. It is around the Watergate scandal that Oliver Stone builds his pantagruelian biographical exposition: a psychedelic journey into the life of a man who for all 2,035 days of presidency held the entire world in his grip.
A bold filmmaker in his ways, in his thinking, and in the substance of his art, who escapes any categorization and is immune to both standards and fashions, who is at the same time both author and historian (also confirming the role of cinema as a valid and effective divulgative source, alongside literature) has succeeded in the daunting task of narrating a difficult character, in public and in private, using the "medium" in every form: archival images and footage, flashbacks, introspective deliriums, dream visions, and abrupt cuts that punctuate a decidedly complex and sophisticated narrative structure.
The art of cinema. The self-destructive spiral of the most powerful man in the world is captured frame by frame: more than three-quarters of the film move in the criminal kinetics of Watergate; the court intrigue is total, all legal links sever, the boundaries that separate the underbelly of democracy from the most savage chaos become unreal. On the brink of catastrophe, Richard W. Nixon sheds the institutional armor, forged by the founding fathers, and lets the man act, in the darkest and bestial madness and in the darkest of solitudes: "A man doesn’t cry, and I don’t cry. A man doesn’t cry, he fights". And immediately after, in one of the numerous sequences consigned to legend, the extreme close-up, sweaty and schizophrenic, where a merciless, almost jester-like Nixon, mocks an entire nation by minimizing the extent of his assets, the ultimate profanation is completed, the lowest and most infernal degree of the anarchy of power is reached.
"They look at you and see how they want to be, they look at me and see how they are," he said, at the foot of a portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, at the White House. The contours between the American dream and nightmare have never appeared as blurred as in the moment when a tired, defeated, and torn Nixon prostrates before an indecipherable Kennedy.
And thus, the "medium" is surpassed.
The gargantuan staging of the meeting between Nixon, Kissinger, and Mao Tse-tung, the chilling and poetic war monologue of the Helmsman, the grainy images of the stormy bombing of Hanoi, the nocturnal meeting between prosecutor John Dean III and hitman Howard Hunt, the frenzied horse writhing in the ferrous word of Edgar Hoover. The frenetic escalation culminates in the ultimate and irresolvable degeneration of Gerald Ford’s fleeting oath to the presidency of a nation that has been both a gentle maternal democracy and a ruthless assassin.
Instead of a ceremonious liberating finale, soaked in hope and the emotion of a choir of children, Oliver Stone leaves us with a series of enigmas that, seventeen years later, we still do not know how to solve. Despite the widespread congestion at the empire's borders and the severe internal erosions, America has not lost its status as the first global superpower, economic and military, that reigns unchallenged, but the general condition is dramatic. The West is a terminally ill patient in convulsions: a year after the farcical conspiracy of Capitol Hill, the last act of a pathetic comedy, an indelible hallmark of a presidential term that favored the path of disgrace over a dignified exit from the scene, the diseased heart of democracy has yet to stop beating, but the intervals between breaths grow increasingly wider.
Today, more than ever, we need men like Oliver Stone and works like NIXON.
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