Nixon.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

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RICHARD NIXON was adept at rejuvenating his image and keeping himself in the public eye, but he probably should have relaxed, since cinema and television have shown a steady fixation on keeping our 37th president within view, albeit from a rather unflattering perspective. During his years out of public life, a variety of fine actors (Rip Torn being the best Nixon incarnation to date) made Nixon somewhere next to Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman as a favorite political subject, and for many of the same reasons that his White House predecessors have been re-created in the media. Nixon is a way of understanding a half-century of American history that has come to represent, for some at least, a nation in decline.

With Nixon's death, there has been both renewed demonization and a surprising attempt to understand the forces that drove the man. The TNT cable network production "Kissinger and Nixon" is of the former camp, with Nixon (Beau Bridges in very heavy makeup) a venal, alcoholic anti-Semite, his regime depending on his Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger (Ron Silver, also unrecognizable--but very effective--in gobs of latex). "Kissinger and Nixon" is not really a Nixon movie; it is about his globe-trotting foreign policy whiz, and Nixon's name seems in the title mainly to capitalize on a Hollywood megafilm released within days of the television production.

Oliver Stone's "Nixon" is certainly not an attempt to rehabilitate the disgraced ex-president, but neither is it another try at having at him. This is the first film to take Nixon seriously, to try to understand what made him tick, to the point that the prerelease publicity for the film made much of the idea that the Nixon story is a tragedy of "Shakespearean proportion." The casting of Sir Anthony Hopkins in the lead underscores the point, but this is where the problems begin. As mightily as Hopkins struggles with the part, and as convincing as he is at times--there are moments when one can half-shut one's eyes and the actor is Nixon--the director asks his audience to make a very big leap. Hopkins looks nothing like Nixon and is too classy a figure to capture the man most of us recall as lowbrow, constricted, and utterly lacking any sense of self-worth. Still, the picture is compelling in its ambitions.

Film buffs will recognize "Citizen Kane" almost as soon as the movie's first scenes appear. Stone uses Orson Welles' classic as his key structuring device, as well as for...