Really, Oliver Stone's career can be pointed after this film when both the critics that loved him for many years, and the public of sorts, turned against him...or Stone's thrashing he got wrongly for NATURAL BORN KILLERS probably burned him for good, since after 1995, his output like ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, U-TURN, and ALEXANDER(do we need to go there?) didn't exactly rule like PLATOON, JFK, and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY did.
Sad since Stone does go out with a bang with perhaps his most ambitious picture as a filmmaker, where he would try to paint a 3+ hour epic tragedy in the hopeful reigns of Shakespeare and CITIZEN KANE, for truely the long-time openly Hollywood liberal filmmaker Oliver Stone surprsied the hell out of me when he didn't simply damn the infamous/legendary President Richard Milhouse Nixon as most people probably expected...instead, Stone doesn't treat Nixon as a demon, but instead a sad humanistic Monster that indeed becomes truely the hideous American cancer as the late Hunter S. Thompson described him as, but not before we feel sorry for how he became such a corrupt, paranoid, egomanic of a person. "Can you imagine what this man would be like had anyone ever loved him?"
But the most touching scene that defines the film for me is after the man that was simply "Nixon", who was born into pure poverty but was able to fight his way into awesome political power with fear and hatred from his opponents, who acheived many notable foreign and domestic policy successes yet never was as loved or immortalized by the public or the press corp as his long-time rival(alive and in spirit) in Kennedy, finally fell from his thrown after an incredible tale of amazing rise to power that Tony Montana can't sniff at, when he comes upon President Kennedy's portrait at the White House and wisely quoted this:
"When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are. "
Somehow, NIXON was left in the shuffle of 1995 when Ron Howard's APOLLO 13 and Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning/Box-Office hit BRAVEHEART took some Oscars...sad because NIXON is a superior picture in everyway compared to those two. Honestly, its not just as great as Stone's PLATOON or JFK or BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, I believe honestly that it is indeed his career-peak of pure cinematic suave and execution as a director.
