Upon first glance, Secret Honor is an outlier in Robert Altman’s career. The director is known and beloved for his sprawling casts, his quasi-realistic dialogue where characters speak over one another. This film, an adaptation of a stage play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, only one has character. He speaks for the entire film, and if there are interruptions to the dialogue, it is because he cannot finish a thought. But once we get beyond those differences, you can see what attracted Altman to the material. The monologue is an actor’s showcase, a frenzied depiction of grievance and history that finds sympathy for loathed, albeit complex figure. For all the directions in which it goes, Secret Honor takes dead aim at someone who, at the time the film was made, wanted to repair his legacy: former President Richard M. Nixon.
Philip Baker Hall plays Nixon, and the time of the film’s 1984 release, he was not a beloved character actor. This was before his guest spot on Seinfeld, or his appearance in early Paul Thomas Anderson films. At first, the shock of his performance is how it captures the man. Former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan famously quipped that the book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was the “least factual and most accurate” account of Nixon’s reelection campaign, and you could say the same about Hall’s Nixon. His mannerisms are exaggerated, a coiled build-up of drunken rage that leads to a series of blistering vindictive against anyone – Kissinger, Kennedy, John Dean – except himself.
The tortured, half-formed dialogue is what adds to the verisimilitude. Baker gives the uncanny impression Nixon thinks faster than he speaks, so there are countless moments where his internal associations force him into a tangent. There is a kind of plot to the film: Nixon narrates his thoughts into a recording for “Roberto,” an aide named but never seen, and stars to uncoil an absurd conspiracy theory. The “secret honor” refers to how Nixon took the fall with Watergate for a secret cabal – one he alternately calls “The Committee of 100” and “The Bohemian Grove” – so they can get wealthy from the heroin trade. At first, it an absurd notion, one given plenty of cover by an opening title crawl that notes the film is a work of fiction. Then again, the middle decades of the American 20th century were riddled with power struggles, conspiracy and corruption.
Unlike Frost/Nixon, another film that considers the later years of his life, Secret Honor does not hold the audience’s hand through Nixon’s biography. It almost requires you to know all significant details, whether it’s the failed 1960 Presidential campaign, his success in defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas, or his constant humiliation that he was never accepted by the country’s elite. Nowadays only history buffs or Nixon obsessives might recall all those details, so it might help to watch Altman’s film with a Wikipedia browser handy.
Historical minutiae notwithstanding, Altman’s direction still gets us most into Nixon’s mindset. His camera moves a great deal, avoiding the feeling of being too stagey, despite taking entirely in a private office. One major flourish is the appearance of four video surveillance cameras, which allow Nixon to keep tabs on his surroundings, and whose grainy appearance become a potent metaphor for his pathological paranoia. Altman will cut to Baker appearing on those cameras, including the famous last shot, to show how his refusal to accept guilt – his zeal in loathing his detractors – made him his worst enemy. Nixon apologists like to point out his policy successes or his approach to diplomacy (he went to China!), although any such revisionism ignores his moral/ethical failings as a man and leader. That is the central truth to Secret Honor, and why the film endures.
Perhaps the biggest legacy to Secret Honor is how it jump-started a cultural fascination with its subject. The Oliver Stone film Nixon and the Charles Ferguson documentary Watergate attempt to be authoritative, although the most memorable depictions of him tend to be exaggerated through genre, like the ‘90s teen comedy Dick or the novel Crooked, which imagines Nixon making a pact with a Lovecraftian evil. None of these make any attempt revitalize the man, whom Hunter S. Thompson once described as “evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it.” But because of his flaws, of which there are legion, he is a fertile figure for adaptation. No one could imagine Nixon from scratch, and yet he is obviously, irredeemably human. Hall’s sputtering, defiant performance gets all that and more, a stirring reminder that the most uncomfortable thing we see in Richard Nixon is ourselves.
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