Cinema
Nixon (15, selected cinemas) Get Shorty (15, selected cinemas)
Tricky Dicky Stoned
Mark Steyn
The Seventies revival proceeds apace. This week, two kitsch figures, long reviled, continue their cult comebacks with new movies. Richard Nixon and John Travolta have much in common: both had massive hits in the Seventies (the second-term landslide and Grease, respectively), both had dodgy running mates (Spiro Agnew, Olivia Newton-John); Nixon had tapes full of expletives deleted, Travolta had tapes full of the Bee Gees; Nixon liked to wave both his hands above his head in double V- signs, Travolta liked to wave one hand above his head, while the other rested on the six-button trouser-band of his white suit and the soundtrack played 'Whether you're a mother or whether you're a broth- er, you're Stayin' Alive.' Quintessential Seventies figures, with so much in com- mon. But only one of them was responsible for the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assas- sination. According to Oliver Stone, any- way.
Sadly, it's not John Travolta. He's the best thing in Get Shorty, a coarsened adap- tation of a fine Elmore Leonard novel, where he plays a small-time loan shark who blags his way into the movie business and outpaces the Hollywood hotshots. The reason, Leonard implies, is that the head honchos and deal-makers and megastars have to expend most of their energy trying to shore up their own faith in their inflated egos. That would seem to be a pretty accu- rate assessment of Oliver Stone, who has been famously paranoid since the criticism of his silly film JFK. This time, he took no chances. For Nixon, he has released a 500- page book exhaustively annotating his screenplay and its sources.
There is, though, no footnote for what's very nearly the President's first word in the film: `cocksucker'. Friends and colleagues have protested that, in all the years they knew him, Nixon never used the term though I remember being told that his instantly suspicious reaction to the news of J. Edgar Hoover's sudden death was `What's that old cocksucker up to?' On the other hand, his attempt at off-camera small talk with David Frost — 'Did you do any fornicating this weekend?' — suggests a man not entirely at ease in the vernacular.
But the problem with Stone's Nixon is not the invented words and scenes, but the stunted, impoverished imagination behind them: it's invented, but not inventive. Our first glimpse of the man, in this three-and- a-quarter-hour film, is on the eve of his downfall, hunched in the corner like a trapped animal, clumsily fingering the famously erased section of the Nixon tapes. He gulps down a triple Scotch and tells Alexander Haig, 'The tear-gassing, the riots, burning the draft cards, Black Pan- thers — we fixed it, Al, and they hate me for it . . .' It's as clunkey as those closing scenes in Columbo or Murder, She Wrote where the villain is inveigled into incrimi- nating himself.
The director's defenders talk about the `greater dramatic truth', but what's depressing is that it's not greater, but so dismally, banally lesser: Stone can't come up with anything better than that Richard Nixon was a paranoid drunk. It's not so much that it's wrong, as that it's boring. Stone takes one of the most complex ifig- ures in American life and trims him to fit the glib clichés of contemporary movie- making.
At the end of the movie, after his resig- nation speech, a haggard, ruined Nixon paces in front of a portrait of Kennedy, handsome and confident (Stone must be about the last man in America who still swallows the Camelot myth). It's too pat, even without Stone giving Nixon a line of Tom Wicker's: 'When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.'
Stone can pose pictures and bat apho- risms back and forth and throw in his usual bunch of sinister, unspecified, right-wing crackpots, but his film lacks utterly any understanding of the world in which it's set.
Anthony Hopkins was presumably cast as Nixon to lend him an air of tragedy. Instead, Hopkins patronises the character and delivers one of his worst performances in years. Nixon is by far the most fiction- alised president of the modern era; within the last year, aside from this, I've seen three plays and a television movie about him: in drama, at least, he has been more than rehabilitated. But Stone's Nixon proved a rare exception. Despite the hype, it bombed at the box-office and gave the director a rare distinction: Oliver Stone is the man who made Nixon uncom- mercial.
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