Secret Honor
Director: Robert Altman
Year Released: 1984
Rating: 1.5
Philip Baker Hall plays Richard M. Nixon in this one-man, one-room non-stop rant. "Nixon," in such a state that he is unable to form clear sentences or mutter a statement without an exclamation point on the end (think the texts of L.-F. Celine as read by Artaud) - basically, he's been given a royal shaft job, it's everyone else's fault and you know, woe is him. This blustering fanaticism - laced with endless profanities - is nice as a curio but insubstantial as a film (or a play, actually) - it does to Nixon what they say critics do to the wounded: shoot them when the war is over. In a particularly self-reflexive moment, "Nixon" the Caricature complains about the media's portrait of the real life Nixon as a caricature ("Tricky Dick")! Naturally, it would take a Neo-Republican in Oliver Stone to actually make a real movie about the man - in my view one of the most underrated films of the '90s - and not play him as a joke.
