ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 6, 1996 TAG: 9601100017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
Like his ``JFK,''' Oliver Stone's ``Nixon'' is brilliant, long (three hours plus), engrossing and flawed.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film is its sympathetic portrayal of Richard Nixon. Stone, so often the whipping boy of conservatives, presents the President as a tragic hero of Shakespearian proportions, a great man brought down by his own flaws. Stone even has the brass to take Orson Welles' ``Citizen Kane'' as his model for the film's structure, atmosphere and scope. He quotes key shots, and John Williams' score recalls Bernard Herrmann's famous music.
As long as Stone sticks to interpretations of documented details of Nixon's career, he's on solid ground. When he indulges his conspiracy fantasies, the film suffers.
In the title role, Anthony Hopkins doesn't try to imitate Nixon's voice and appearance. Instead, he suggests the President's familiar mannerisms and gestures, and creates a complex, believable character.
As seen by producer-director Stone and his co-writers Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, Nixon is strongly influenced throughout his life by two women, his mother, Hannah (Mary Steenburgen), and his wife, Pat (Joan Allen).
His mother's stern Quaker beliefs are summed up in the phrase, ``Strength in this life, happiness in the next.'' In the darkest hours of the Watergate crisis, it's her ghost that rises up before him in mute accusation. Pat Nixon plays a different and larger role. At every key moment in her husband's political career, she provides the voice of truth and reason, and finally emerges as the sane center of the film.
Joan Allen's performance is as strong as Hopkins', virtually guaranteeing an Oscar nomination.
Around the Nixons are wonderfully colorful supporting characters: aides Haldeman (James Woods) and Ehrlichman (J.T. Walsh) who were followed by the sleek Al Haig (Powers Boothe); Attorney General John Mitchell (E.G. Marshall) and his wild wife, Martha (Madeleine Kahn); FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Hoskins) and his lover Clyde Tolson (Brian Bedford); the wily Kissinger (Paul Sorvino); beleaguered press secretary Ron Ziegler (David Paymer); and John Dean (David Hyde Price), the young lawyer who brings them down.
As he's done before, Stone weaves the various stands of the story together with breathtaking skill, moving back and forth in time, and creating tension when his audience already knows the outcome. The surreal flourishes, so excessive in ``Natural Born Killers,'' are used sparingly and effectively here.
But at the film's core, Stone lets his credulous conspiracy theories loose and undercuts himself. According to the film, just before the assassination of John Kennedy, Nixon was warned by wacko right-wing Texans that something was going to happen.
Why? It all has to do with plots hatched in the Eisenhower administration to kill Castro, or something to that effect. The film is deliberately vague in that area, strongly suggesting that Nixon felt guilty about the whole matter.
Curiously, Stone casts Larry Hagman as ``Jack Jones,'' the fictional Texan who leads these shadowy villains. It's impossible to see Hagman without remembering his famous role on TV's ``Dallas.'' Maybe when J.R. Ewing wasn't up to all those nasty schemes against Sue Ellen, he was conspiring to overthrow the government.
That whole subplot is a serious and needless mistake. Stone could have stuck to the truth, or a recognizable version of it, and made a fine film. There are more than enough contradictions, conflicts and reversals in Richard Nixon's life to fuel a piece of popular entertainment. And that, after all, is what this ``Nixon'' is - entertainment, not history.
Nixon
*** 1/2
A Hollywood Pictures release playing at the Grandin and Tanglewood Mall Theatres. 190 min. Rated R for strong language, some violence.
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Anthony Hopkins (left) is Richard Nixon and James Woodsby CNBis H.R. Haldeman in Oliver Stone's "Nixon. color.