This film has a massive cast of A-listers, from Sir Anthony Hopkins to Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, Paul Sorvino, and a stellar Joan Allen as Pat Nixon. They all deliver some of their best work as the various heroes and villains (mostly villains) of the Nixon era.
But it's all overshadowed by Oliver Stone's hammy reinterpretation of events and personalities. He can't help himself. Hopkins disappears into the role, but he plays Tricky Dick as a sort of werewolf, deeply wounded but also full of inhuman rage. Joan Allen's Oscar-bait performance as Pat Nixon is reduced to this drunk in a housecoat, when the real Mrs. Nixon was steely and humble. Paul Sorvino hits it just right as the egomaniacal and childish Henry Kissinger. James Woods similarly nails Haldeman's icy prick style.
Overall, the film reads like Stone's cheap ripoff of a great Greek tragedy. We're meant to feel sorry for Dick Nixon, and maybe we should, but Stone takes us on this journey with baffled wonder. "Aren't we supposed to hate Nixon," he essentially asks. For those of us who came of age after The Age of Nixon, we're left without that essential bafflement. Stone and his Boomer-era peers may feel conflicted about admiring and pitying their hated Nixon, but the rest of us feel no such conflict about seeing him within the broader historical context of the era.
People were expecting another JFK - another film about a determined boy scout bringing The System to its knees - but they got this stage play about the sorrow of a great man ruined by insecurities and societal tumult.