CINEMA: DEATH OF A SALESMAN

POOR RICHARD NIXON: THE MOST human President of the television age. A better statesman than politician, a tireless but graceless campaigner, a successful salesman who was liked but not well liked, the man seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. The canniest moments in the three-plus hours of Nixon, Oliver Stone's dense, ultimately disappointing biopic, capture Nixon at his most pathetically endearing--the Commander in Chief as klutz. In a telling vignette lifted from Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days, Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) gets so frustrated at his inability to remove a medicine safety cap that he finally bites it off.

Stone typically bites and claws at his subjects, then spits out phantasmagoric movie melodrama--terrific stuff like Platoon and JFK. This time he's almost mellow. The script, which he wrote with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, argues that Nixon had a dark role in anti-Castro mischief; the Cuba connection keeps echoing. The movie also nails him for the Cambodian bombing that set in motion the destruction of a beautiful country. Oddly, Stone doesn't find Nixon guilty of starting the Vietnam War or killing John Kennedy. He does pock the film with right-wing poobahs who anticipate, with frothing pleasure, the deaths of J.F.K. and his brother Robert.

The film ricochets through 50 years of Nixon's life; it suggests that he never outgrew a severe rural childhood or an attachment to his stern mother; it includes both a March of Time summation of his career and a scene in which the great man argues with his wife across the expanse of a long dinner table. Citizen Nixon, anyone? You might expect that Stone, our most vigorous and cinematically ambitious director, would be drawn to create a prismatic, Kane-like portrait of a potentate who was an enigma, not least to himself. But no. Stone is content to dramatize major episodes from the life. Some have voltage, but others are dry re-enactments inserted for the record. This gives much of the film an oddly pageantlike, perfunctory tone. It's a $43 million term paper.

In a huge cast of good actors, James Woods stands out as steely Bob Haldeman, and Joan Allen suggests in deft brush strokes a Pat Nixon condemned to stand by her ungiving man. Hopkins, though, is a failure. He finds neither the timber of Nixon's plummy baritone, with its wonderfully false attempts at intimacy, nor the stature of a career climber who, with raw hands, scaled the mountain and was still not high or big enough.

The real Nixon was a tragicomic figure; he doesn't need Stone's demonizing or mythologizing touch. His saga, moreover, is familiar from a quillion docudramas and Saturday Night Live skits. It is also imprinted in the TV memories of Americans over 35. The President's bizarre farewell speech, nicely re-created by Hopkins, captures that spooky poignancy. Then as he boards Air Force One, Hollywood gives way to archive videotape, and we see the real Nixon with his implausible grin and victory wave of the arms--apotheosis and self-parody in one indelibly weird moment. For once, the gonzo director has met his match. Real life, if it's real Nixon, is more dramatic than an Oliver Stone movie.