Oliver Stone's scrapbook, lapsing at times into collage, on our thirty-seventh President -- assembled with characteristic hands-of-Stone clumsiness, and overloaded to the groaning point. (One by one the cherished anecdotes materialize: Nixon talking in the dead of night to the Presidential portraits; Nixon "rapping" with peaceniks bivouacked at the Lincoln Memorial; Nixon coercing Kissinger into joining him on his knees in prayer -- Stone can't pass up this stuff!) As a psychological profile -- the inferiority complex, the envy, the egotism, the paranoia -- the movie holds together and holds water. And it even has moments of illumination and instructiveness. But it's also tunnel-visioned, repetitive, overlong at three-hours-plus, gimmicky (flashbacks within flashbacks, time-lapse clouds as a synonym of blown calendar leaves, mid-scene switches from color to black-and-white, an Expressionistic dream scene, a ghostly visitation from Mother), and dramatically inchoate. Anthony Hopkins as a wrong-sounding Nixon; Joan Allen as an unbelievably naggy Pat (alias "Buddy"); James Woods with a correct but unflattering Haldeman haircut; the unrecognizable Paul Sorvino as a yes-man Kissinger -- all are entertaining in their various ways, but not enough to carry the movie even halfway. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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