For those of you searching for a film that casts a humanitarian light onto the life and times of Richard Nixon, you should check out Robert Altman's Secret Honour. Within, we are introduced to Nixon and only Nixon as he rants and raves for an hour and a half about how he was universally coerced during his political career, drinks Chivas Regal, and ponders blowing his brains out. Played by Philip Baker Hall (Tom Cruise's father in Magnolia and one of Larry David's Doctor's in the early moments of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 4), this fictional version of Nixon breaks through the shallow conceptions which the media often employ to tether his volatile life to a mundane manipulative caricature. I'm no expert on the Nixon phenomenon, but Secret Honour does successfully accomplish the remarkable task of pointing out the socialist side of this iconic Republican, thereby accentuating the irrational's pervasive influence on so many attempts to isolate an individuality.
Not that I like Richard Nixon.
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