Head-to-Head: Nixons on Film

Elvis and Nixon, starring Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey as the two (in) famous American icons, is coming out soon, and though it might be a while till I get a chance to see it, I have to admit I'm very intrigued, especially by how their performances will pan out. Neither actor is a spitting image of the man they're imitating but both are also exceedingly talented, so I'll definitely be giving it a shot. For fun I thought it'd be cool to look at the various actors who've played Nixon over the years so I can see how Spacey matches up with them.

Note: I haven't seen Beau Bridges in Kissinger and Nixon (1995) yet.

Note: I would do an Elvis head-to-head, but I've only seen Kurt Russell (who was extremely good as Elvis) and Val Kilmer, kinda, in True Romance (who was also fairly spot-on), as well as Nicolas Cage in a way with his Elvis impersonation in Wild at Heart. I might do it in the near future.

5. John Cusack played Richard Nixon in The Butler (2013)

The Butler is not a very good attempt at sentimental Oscar-bait. I say attempt because it doesn't even fulfil the usual requirements of pining for an Oscar properly since it can never seem to decide whether it wants to be a serious look at the 34-year tenure of a White House butler Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) against the backdrop of the race relations movement in America, or an insight into the White House environment and the various presidents, the film had to take one direction and stick to it, or be a better film overall. Unfortunately Lee Daniels (who directed the brilliant Precious so he's a good director let me make that clear) decides to throw everything in and see how it sticks together, and it really fails to achieve any sort of cohesion. There are moments, but it's mostly just a drawn-out, mundane affair that tries to be inspirational but ends up being sanctimonious.

The episodic nature of the film makes for some truly jarring transitions in terms of tone and the screenplay, with the characterization of Gaines' relationship with his son (David Oyelowo trying his very best) particularly poor and lacking any sort of clear arc. There's unnecessary diversions from the plot, and as for the various presidents in the White House, well I guess each make their mark though none in a terribly good way. The late, great Robin Williams and Alan Rickman are done great disservices by some awkward makeup as Presidents Eisenhower and Regan, Liev Schrieber is mildly amusing as Lyndon B. Johnson but also nothing special, James Marsden JFK bears not a single bit of resemblance to JFK but he's fairly charming in the role I guess.

What about Cusack? Well thankfully the makeup department didn't bother in this regard since Cusack looks absolutely nothing like Nixon and would never be able to be made up into anything vaguely resembling him. In terms of disappearing into the role Cusack doesn't bother, he does a sorta attempt at a Tricky Dick voice but it's fairly close to his own natural accent and voice, his mannerisms are not to heavily put on but enough to make his scenes feel like a bit of an SNL skit, without the laughs. I will grant that he's somewhat entertaining in the role, particularly in his first scene as Vice President where he rudely interacts with the White House staff by throwing them his election pins.

Still, this is a lacklustre effort by Cusack, an actor I generally really like when he tries in a role (I liked him a lot in Love & Mercy, Grosse Pointe Blank and especially Say Anything), and gets to use his strengths of boyish charm, and light comedy, unfortunately the film pigeonholes him with a poor caricature of Nixon who gets to do barely anything besides sneer and act like a bit of an arse.

2.5/5

4. Anthony Hopkins played Richard Nixon in Nixon (1995)

Nixon is another bombastic, over-the-top and (by all accounts) fairly liberal with the truth, Oliver Stone biopic concerning an American Preisdent, this time round Nixon. It's actually a finely made film in terms of production values, the editing is seamless, the cinematography is quite good, the script is fine and overall the over-the-top style of Oliver Stone does work for the film. What does bog it down a bit are most of the performances. Outside of James Woods, Sam Waterston and Joan Allen, everyone else overplays their cards a tad bit too loud and fail to create realistic-feeling characters, or even very engaging ones at all.

Reading about Stone's decision to cast Hopkins in the role is most curious. Stone's intent for the role as is clear by the use of makeup for Nixon, the ominous direction and soundtrack to most of his scenes, the way the script is designed to make him a monster with a few human qualities rather than the other way round, is that Nixon should be portrayed as a none-too-subtle, larger-than-life figure. The studio gave him two ideal choices, Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson. Now I should say neither of these actors I'd have thought would make great choices, Hanks is always at his best when eschewing mannerisms and focusing on more emotional, subtle character work, Nicholson at that particular stage in his career would've probably been impossible to rein in and have turned in the most indulgent performance of his career, quite possibly. Gene Hackman was also considered for the role, who could've been great, as was Gary Oldman (likewise), though neither look anything like Nixon and also I don't think they'd have necessarily been a big fan of Stone's approach here. There was also considerations for Robin Williams (who I actually really like the idea of as his manic approach I presume, would be at the very least interesting to watch) and Tommy Lee Jones (who would've been a bit miscast I felt).

Instead, Stone went with Hopkins, based on his performances in The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands both from 1993. Now this is very bizzare to me since those two performances are, indeed, Hopkins' finest onscreen work (he's my #1 and #2 for that year for TROTD and Shadowlands respectively), but also two of his most subtlest, restrained performances as a repressed and proper butler, and the kindly, quiet and shy C.S. Lewis. Hopkins here shows nothing of the restraint of those performances, his performance as Nixon is loud ACTING to its fullest, everything he does from his postures while sitting, his facial expressions, his weird mouth movements, all feel not only very calculated but are also intensely distracting. Nixon was never as far as we can tell from the media, this odd a chap, and Hopkins' decision to play Tricky Dick as quite frankly, a Mad Hatter of sorts, makes his performance problematic in its very conception.

Nixon is a paranoid, constantly paranoid figure, addled even more by drug and alcohol abuse (questionable in its factual basis), who has trouble with social and political interaction. There's not a bit of charm to Nixon in his portrayal which frankly makes it unbelievable that Hopkin's Nixon would ever become a politician in any sort of capacity, let alone President of the United States. This Nixon feels like an idiot, which would work in a comedy (I'll get onto a performance that makes a stupid Nixon work in a bit), but here in a dead serious film it feels odd. I can't fault Hopkins too much as the way his scenes are written and directed mean that he has to go down this route, there really isnt any other way. The lunacy of Nixon is most palatably felt in scenes like the one below where he angrily berates his cabinet and asserts his power. Now Hopkins is actually entertaining to watch in these scenes, but he also lacks the nuance and subtle manipulation I'm sure Nixon did show in his private affairs, instead it's just a full-blown OTT portrayal of anger.

Hopkins has some scenes though where he's quite good actually. His reflections about his parents, portraying the isolation of the character, are all quite good, also despite lacking any romantic chemistry with his onscreen wife (Pat Nixon played by Joan Allen) they do share a certain sort of connection. He's also quite good in the scene below with Sam Waterston's CIA director Richard Helms where his mannered approach is actually quite well attuned to Waterstone's more subtle, at ease approach.

In the end this is a performance I can't quite hate since it is not an out-of-place performance in the scheme of the film, with the writing behind his Nixon there was no other way for Hopkins to play the man, and also it is Anthony Hopkins after all, a man whose talent always shines through, albeit in lesser extents in films like this. Hopkins had a fantastic string of performances in the 1990s which exemplified his apitutde as an actor, this is not one of them since it lacks the nuance and style which he gave to roles like Hannibal Lecter, and you know a performance in a biopic is deeply flawed when the actor could've stepped in as a cannibal serial killer and still in this character given a more restrained and subtle portrayal of a presidency.

2.5/5

3. Frank Langella played Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon (2009)

Frost/Nixon is a fairly strong biopic. It's directed by Ron Howard who while lacking in cinematic flair, is usually quite good at this sort of film, he also directed the excellent racing biopic Rush and the engaging space travel/disaster film Apollo 13. This film is flawed in some regards that beat similarities to an earlier Howard biopic, A Beautiful Mind, in that despite its fascinating source material it takes a far too workmanlike approach that mutes the impact of it. Howard has kind of the opposite problem of Stone in that he tries to do to little as opposed to too much with his direction, although I certainly prefer Frost/Nixon overall. The film worked for me very well as an examination of the relationship onscreen and offscreen between a retired President Nixon and his interviewer, British television David Frost (an excellent Michael Sheen), as they engage in a battle of wits on a televised series of interviews. The rest of the film is slightly more lacklustre, the supporting cast is mostly quite solid although their characters are thinly drawn, and as I mentioned the lack of any sort of clear style to it means that the film is watchable on account of its source material and the central relationship.

Well what about it then, how is Langella's Nixon, which was already hyped prior to the release of this film. Frost/Nixon is based on a 2006 play by Peter Morgan and Langella here reprises the role he played onstage, which had received an abudance of critical acclaim for the veteran character actor. Now a trouble sometimes with stage performances transitioning to the silver screen is that they feel too 'stagey'. An example of this is Yul Brynner in The King & I, his approach feels a bit too overly 'audience-orientated' on the silver screen so that, even though he's not bad at all, he fails to make as much of an impact as he surely did in his onstage performance. Langella does not fall into this trap, in my opinion.

Langella is indeed quite overt and mannered in his portrayal of Nixon. These are not the usual sorts of Nixon mannerisms, and this is probably the point of most contention one will find in discussions of this performance. Some might find these mannerisms distracting, I personally thought they worked as they made Nixon a sufficiently paranoid and off-putting presence without being too overbearing as it was with Hopkins. It also helps that little to no makeup work is done to Langella, allowing him to give frankly a more natural performance than his predecessor Hopkins.

Langella imbues his Nixon with a certain sort of melancholy and sadness behind a frame of brute unfeeling emotional armour. This attempt to make Nixon more of a sympathetic figure in light of his impeachement and his more retiring state of being, does work because Langella is quite good at just portraying the more relaxed qualities of Nixon in many regards of life, at least when he's not in front of the cameras. Once in front of the cameras though Nixon becomes a different sort of figure, a more public one. I particularly love the little moment below where Langella slightly puts his interviewer Frost off-track by a little conversation before the interview, showing a false amicability and cheekiness to the man that is employed to attack his defences.

Langella and Michael Sheen work very well in their scenes together to generate a tension between the two characters that never really relents even in the supposedly more 'lighthearted' moments. Langella handles these scenes well by exuding the right amount of control in scenes where he's being friendly. There's also his 'loud' scenes where he loses that control and veers closer to the raving lunatic most films enjoy portraying him as. Now I will say there's moments where this gets a bit out of hand, not Nixon's yelling but rather Langella's yelling. They're not as effective as his quieter scenes because they come across as a bit forced at times, nevertheless Langella is never bad in these scenes, it's just not as good as the rest of his performance. There is the one scene, a drunken scene where he calls Frost and goes on a rant, that technically is a bit excessive again, but Langella makes it a great scene by his quieter approach towards the end of the conversation as a man truly regretful of what he has done. This is not a flawless performance, far from it as the BIG scenes verge on the hammy, but in his quieter moments and in the general creation of his character, and chemistry with Sheen, Langella does a very good job with Nixon that, unlike Hopkins, was deserving of an Oscar nomination, although he wouldn't even make my top 10 of the year. 

4/5

2. Dan Hedaya played Richard Nixon in Dick (1999)

Dick is a very enjoyable film about two airheaded teens (played by a delightfully ditzy Michelle Williams and Kristen Dusnt), who strike up a friendship with Richard Nixon on a school trip and inadvertently uncover the Watergate scandal.  The film is surprisingly fresh and original in its flair and energetic direction, bolstered with a funny if fairly predictable script, and the whole cast is energetic and pleasing from the lead actresses to the supporting players, including a young pre-Anchorman Will Ferrell doing his own take on Bob Woodward, Robert Redford's real-life character in All the President's Men.

Out of the whole cast though, the highlight is easily Hedaya. One thing Hedaya really has going for him here is that he's a spitting image of Nixon in real life. Even when watching his excellent, searing performance as a vengeful husband in Blood Simple or his roles in The Addams Family I couldn't help but think, my wouldn't he be awesome as Richard Nixon. This was only further exacerbated by watching him in a small role in Nixon (1995), where I kept thinking, Oliver Stone, look, there's your Nixon!! Anyway I digress. Hedaya has the advantage of looking like the chap himself, but if Morgan Freeman in Invictus is anything to go by, resemblance to the real-life figure does not always guarantee a great performance. Moreover, Hedaya has an added challenge here in that the film demands he play not an exact biographical depiction of Nixon, but rather a version of Nixon that fits in more with the comedic demands of the film. That being the Nixon in this version is written as a more bumbling than malevolent, he's not a nice chap but it's more of a fickle, none-too-bright sort of not-niceness than a mostly evil figure as Hopkins portrayed him. This is furthered by the film's somewhat worn-out use of Richard Nixon's nickname 'dick' for a frequent laugh that does get a bit worn out after a while.

Therefore Hedaya's challenge here is to make Nixon an amusing and somewhat endearing figure to laugh, without compromising the qualities that make Nixon such an impressionable figure in the public eye, and a villain so to speak to make the film's premise of 'airheaded teenage girls take down the President' work. Well suffice to say Hedaya is up to the task, and more. His performance is technically speaking very mannered, but the difference between him and Hopkins, and indeed Langella, is that these mannerisms are both not distracting, and are actually quite spot on imitations of Nixon's public image. It's rather brilliant, then, how Hedaya manages to use them to make Nixon, who up till this point and afterwards has almost always remained a pretty serious onscreen figure, extremely amusing.

The use of Nixon's distinctive guttural voice, and Hedaya's EXTREMELY emotive eyebrows to deliver, with utmost presidential conviction, ridiculous lines to his dog like 'Checkers - shut up. Or I'll feed you to the Chinese', offering the girls an opportunity to work as his dog walkers, and trying to bluff about Watergate to them, Hedaya is always going for laughs with his somewhat ridiculous approach, and it works, completely. Now technically speaking this Nixon is every bit as reprehensible, even more so, than the previous Nixons in terms of his actions, Hedaya makes the various behaviours and actions of Nixon so darned funny and thus, somewhat lovable in just how inept he is most of the time. The intent of these scenes might be questionable in a historical context but I really don't care, they're funny and that's all that matters.

As the film progresses, the film focuses more on the investigation by the girls and the reporters Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post. Nixon is however, not one to be pushed into the background, especially in Hedaya's hands. He has several hilarious scenes like his marijuana-laced conversations with Leonid Brezhnev to lead to the end of the Vietnam war, and whenever he gets really, really angry or even better, anxious about the press finding out about not only Watergate, but Arlene's (Michelle Williams) infatuation with him. Now this latter element I wouldn't buy if it had been any other Nixon, after all Hopkins' was too grotesque, Hall's too drunken and extreme, Langella's too much of a downer, and Cusack would've just been mistaken as Lloyd Dobler visits the White House!! But the fact that Hedaya makes this work is testament to the strength of his comedic performance here. He's extremely funny as the Nixon we all love to mock and chuckle at, but also manages to incredulously make him a somewhat sweet, sympathetic character by the film's conclusion, which all in all is fairly remarkable since the film doesn't really excuse anything he does.

4.5/5

1. Philip Baker Hall played Richard Nixon in Secret Honor (1984)

Secret Honor is an interesting enough film, lacking in a certain cinematic style which can be easily forgiven as it's filmed in more of a theatrical way, essentially presenting a real-time depiction of Richard Nixon in office. A one-man show of the most distinct sort, which is an interesting variation on the usual Robert Altman films I've seen like Nashville and Gosford Park where a large ensemble and expansive focus is given to the films, here the film's focus is one performance and one performance only, and to say Altman tones down his usual directorial flourishes is putting it lightly.

As you can see, this film is all centered on Hall's performance, and thus the film's effectiveness starts and ends with him. This puts an incredible challenge him, more so than Langella who had Michael Sheen to fall upon in his lesser moments, and Hopkins who had Stone's direction and a script that fit his performance to rely upon. Well Hall's an always capable actor, he was fantastic in Magnolia and pretty good in Hard Eight, I haven't seen all that much of him but enough to be fully confident that his performance in this was going to be at the very least interesting, and indeed he does not disappoint. Once onscreen Hall is very well set as Nixon, and he's not made up at all to look like him, nor does he really attempt to do the usual Nixon mannerisms. This does make sense for the film as we are watching Nixon in private, thereby allowing Hall to give his own interpretation of how he think Nixon would act in the confines of his office in the White House.

I guess one could say this whole performance is a bit of a constant ramble, Hall never stops talking, talking to himself for the whole performance, whether it's blaring into a microphone or getting drunk and raving. This is a performance that technically follows many of the same beats as Hopkins' performance, but where Hopkins depicted them as the actions of some groteque creature even in the public eye, even in the confinements of his own personal space Hall does not turn the man into a monster but reveals the monsters within the man. Hall somehow, despite being given a role prime for showboating, resists the urge to ever chew the scenery with OTT ACTING even though being the only one in the room, there's a lot of it to chew on. This is not a subtle performance by any means, but somehow Hall manages to find a way to make the extreme antics of Nixon fused with the realistic actions of a man contemplating his growing madness and potential suicide. 

There's a lot of material for Hall to get through as Nixon ruminates about his life and career, and gradually escaltes each and every monologue into an increasing rage, starting from a repressed sort of dignity and ending his performance with a very loud series of 'fuck you's' to the audience. Hall rather excellently builds up this intensity, better than Langella considerably I'd say who had a tendency to suddenly erupt into anger without making much sense about where his character was coming from. This is a performance that has a great deal of power in its implications. Like Langella's Nixon, we never see the actual events that lead to his downfall but both performances give an effective sense of the history of Nixon, and the whole progression of it towards this moment in time, in a far better fashion than Cusack or Hopkins. Now Hall goes a step further by also leading us further into the man's mind by making each of these implied points in Nixon's life flow together seamlessly with the topsy turvy moods of Nixon. 

It's so impressive how Hall manages to achieve this by himself since the film's visual style doesn't really do all that much to aid this performance, in this regard he's much more at a disadvantage than other one-man shows of sorts like Tom Hardy in Locke, Robert Redford in All is Lost, Tom Hanks in Cast Away, Sandra Bullock in Gravity, Bruce Dern in Silent Running, and James Franco in 127 Hours. All these performances had directors utilizing a certain style, to an extent a stronger script (the one of Secret Honor does feel a bit reptitive in contrast to the brilliant one of Locke), also Hall never really gets a quiet moment like Redford, and Hanks to allow for some momentary pause in his performance, and in Hardy and Bullock's cases, pretty effective brief 'cameo' voices, to guide them along. Hall has only himself and that he remains so compelling throughout is just marvelous, since he has no one else to rely upon if he fails. I would not quite call it my favourite one-man show performance (I will probably do a future blog post on it but as a little spoiler my favourite one-man show is easily an actor I've perhaps over-written about on this blog and have no shame in doing so), but it certainly is the one with the biggest challenge, and while I don't love the film, I do love Hall's performance in it. 

5/5