Philip Baker Hall is a face whom you may recognize on a good day, appearing in a lot of movies and TV, and probably best known these days for appearing in three of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies, Hard Eight (as the lead), Boogie Nights, and Magnolia. He's an actor a lot of people like but not many list among the greats, mostly because he's been relegated to small roles all his life. I could count myself among this crowd, but that would have to be before I saw Secret Honor. In fact, a lot of how I feel, not just about Philip Baker Hall but also film acting and speculative history, can be put into the categories of "before Secret Honor" and "after Secret Honor".
We're greeted with a text crawl:
This work is a fictional meditation
concerning the character of and events
in the history of Richard M. Nixon, who
is impersonated in this film.
The dramatist's imagination has created
some fictional events in an effort
to illuminate the character of
President Nixon.
This film is not a work of history or
a historical recreation. It is a work of
fiction, using as a fictional character
a real person, President Richard M. Nixon--
in an attempt to understand.
The meditation is here more of a primal scream, pitting a solitary Nixon (Hall), holed up in his study with Scotch, a tape recorder, CCTV screens, a camera, and a revolver, against the world. There are no other characters, and Nixon never leaves his study. The only other faces we see are portraits of Lincoln, Washington, Eisenhower, Wilson, Kissinger and Nixon's mother. He speaks to his assistant Roberto (who isn't there), issuing various instructions, including sending a manuscript to his publishers. And then the dams break, beginning with the proclamation to "your honor" that the pardon given to "my client" was fake. He dictates wildly, supposedly into the tape recorder but moving too much for it to pick up anything. His speech is a vast swath, veering in numerous directions from his High School debate results to the dark secrets he carried with him through the Presidency. Occasionally he stops and asks Roberto to erase everything he just said. Though animated he appears under control (aside from four-letter words); this changes with the Committee of 100.
The above note on fictional events is no lie; Secret Honor rewrites Nixon's life to include a secret organization, one that attracted Nixon with the promise of pushing him into Congress and ended up forcing him to invent Watergate as a way out, to escape their plan. There are many allegations, some odd and shocking (such as Marilyn Monroe's murder by the CIA). It would help the viewer to have a good working knowledge of Nixon's life (I was fuzzy on some events, particularly his relationship to the Cuba Missile Crisis and the Alger Hiss case). It is only a small part of the film's strategy to push Nixon away from a vilified public menace and more as a man trapped between external pressures and internal horrors. And the horrors are deep and tragic, stretching from his brothers' early deaths to his mother's control. All of this, truly everything, is delivered by Hall in one of the most unbelievable performances in all of film.
You've never seen a Nixon like this, working at articulation but swooping too fast between sideshow barker and raging lunatic. There are small moments where he assumes the role of his own lawyer, and attempts presentability. But there is no hope, as his absolute, manic passion drives him over natural expression and into hyperaction: waving his arms, using all the octaves available to his voice, cursing for anchor points, pulling childish faces, each turn in language gripping him to his very core. He's at the end of all available ropes, and the fact we can understand him at all is a testament to his intelligence and purpose. Through all of this, his mother keeps breaking through, not really there but there enough.
Based off a stage play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, the movie was directed by Robert Altman (Nashville, M.A.S.H., Gosford Park) while he was a professor at University of Michigan, using a largely student crew. Altman always had an "actors first" method to direction and nothing less than that would suffice with a performance this complicated; he makes the eternally wise decision of staying out of Hall's way. The camera roves on its own, making lovely moments amidst the sound and fury, but they are merely accentuations, never jarring, and I couldn't imagine seeing the film without them. The music by George Burt (who I've never heard of before) is also unintrusive and essential, taking cues from the great 50's soundtracks by people like Bernstein and Herrmann.
I suspect that this film's obscurity is due less to its low budget and independent status, but rather a polarizing effect from Hall's performance. He took enormous risks, giving everything he had into every second, and one could make a case that nobody would really act like that. It's a kind of litmus test for those who can only accept naturalistic acting, as Hall is neither naturalistic or surreal. Either way, you can't take your eyes off him, not for a second. The film's intent may have helped as well. Made more than 10 years after Nixon's impeachment, it was released at a time when public opinion was only beginning to soften on Watergate, and I suspect that most people went in expecting something less sympathetic and complex. I wasn't a huge fan of Oliver Stone's W.; ts conception seemed to be decided more by Stone's publicist than Stone himself, as if they wouldn't want the chance to get a cynical, left wing biopic pass in the small window where Bush was still in office but nobody would get mad. There's no part of me that believed that film was "an attempt to understand" (and I'm saying this as a liberal). I can certainly bet that nobody was expecting someone to make Secret Honor.
If you're not a fan of political drama, you may be left in the dust, but either way I'd say you shouldn't go another week without seeing this movie. Hall's portrayal of Nixon should be held up as one of the greatest performances in any film, but nobody talks about it (though we are past the time when people talk about Altman movies). Its inclusion in the Criterion Collection isn't enough. So in order to sway you, I've included it here:
~PNK
No comments:
Post a Comment