Nixon

I didn’t get a chance to go see W over the weekend, and since everyone seems to hate it I think I probably won’t go. At the same time, I’m pretty baffled that the film got made at all. The seeming precedent, Oliver Stone’s Nixon, was a huge commercial failure: “As of December 19, 2006, the film has grossed a total of $13,681,765 domestically, well below its $44 million budget.” What about that result made people think it would be a good business move to have Stone direct a movie about George W. Bush?

Meanwhile, I liked Nixon. The theatrical release is messed up by the fact that the filmmakers seem to have been intimidated by Richard Helms’ threats of lawsuits into cutting the scenes in which he appears. This both deprives you of an excellent scene that you can see on the director’s cut DVD release, and also somewhat throws the plotline off course.

And, yes, the plot! This is where W, based on all the reviews, seems to have really gone off base. A lot of people found Nixon outrageous because Stone has inserted a wild conspiracy theory into a very meticulously researched and historically grounded film. The film has tremendous verisimilitude acquired through the use of real archival film and artful attention to detail. But that’s spliced together with a kind of crazy story in which Nixon is plagued by guilt over his connections to a shadowy group that’s responsible for killing JFK and probably Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and God knows who else. This is, among other things, what’s on the infamous missing eighteen minutes of tape. Is this a historically responsible thing to do? From a certain philistine perspective, no. But it’s what makes the film work — Nixon is a larger-than-life, stranger-than-fiction character and there are real gaps in the historical record. Gaps that stone fills with a very large fiction.

But for W, Stone has, by all accounts, come up with . . . nothing. Or, rather, Bush feels unloved by his dad. Blah.