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Between Aykroyd's Saturday Night Live skewering and Stone's faux-Shakespearean mythologizing, "an attempt to understand" the Nixon enigma. The beginning points up the link to Krapp's Last Tape, recorder joins Scotch bottle and loaded pistol as crucial props in the wood-paneled bunker that is the disgraced former President's diminished world. Stooped in his burgundy smoking jacket, Tricky Dick (a virtuosic incarnation by Philip Baker Hall) paces and stumbles and roars and mewls and dictates a marathon monologue seesawing from maudlin defense to ferocious exposé. Richard III imagines himself as Hamlet, "I could always cry in public," a matter of performance. Sentences broken and picked up, snickers for imagined witticisms, profanities for enemies. "Today, the dogcatcher is king!" Fulminating feuds with JFK and Henry "Asshole" Kissinger, supplicating séances with Mother. Portraits of Lincoln, Washington and Eisenhower play silent witness, so does a quartet of flickering video monitors. "And what the hell do I get for following orders for 30 goddamn years? Is this it? A fuckin' pardon?" A zigzagging line of thought in a chamber quickly filling with bile, a bracing laboratory experiment by Robert Altman. (Cohen runs a kaleidoscopic parallel with The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.) Nixon the deluded exile, the irate clown, the "Bohemian Grove" puppet. Nixon the old demon with a human face, spitting venom into a microphone and ordering it to be erased. Old college songs, requiem for the China plan, the MacGuffin of Watergate. "What else? Money and power." What finally emerges, in the force and pity of Altman's scrutiny, is less an indictment of Nixon than an implosion of a political system, his final "Fuck 'em!" cry amplified into cacophony only to crumble into static. Cinematography by Pierre Mignot.
--- Fernando F. Croce |