Our Nixon

Another "Nixon is a creep" assassination movie. Pointless.

Reality cant be altered, even by a conservatard. Right wing traitors should be shown for what they are.

Although the goal of the home videos was to provide the public a firsthand look at the White House administration's role before and after the Watergate scandal, I believe it demonstrated how a young group was appointed to leadership positions and how authority was abused. The majority of the men appear to be regretful that they were apprehended and punished, and they wish they could have carried out the same deeds more cleverly and without leaving any evidence behind. Upon listening to the recordings, it appears that the president attempted to deny any knowledge of any wrongdoing or plot because he was aware of the taping system. However, I was shocked to learn that H. R Haldeman admitted to the president that he was fully aware of every move made. The president was willing to put his own close aides or "brothers" under the bus in order to avoid indictment, which I believe demonstrated how much more cunning he was. The others accepted their penalty and, unlike most criminals, were permitted to carry on with their occupations after being freed.

Our Nixon seemed to be well-received in its North American premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. This film is a compilation of footage of the Nixon years composed of archival footage from the era, interviews with participants, contemporary audio recordings of public events, audio of the Nixon White House tapes, and most peculiarly never before Super 8 home videos taken by Nixon aides H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin. The film, while clearly critical of Nixon, seems to be attempting to humanize Nixon and his aides by providing an up close and personal view of him and those closest to him. But what emerges isn't particularly informative. The film seems to retell many familiar events: the winding down of the Vietnam War, the release of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon's Visit to China, and the Watergate Scandal (among others) without providing much that is historically new or different from many previous re-tellings of these events. The home videos provide a slightly different shading of events, but nothing that is particularly startling or new. The Nixon White House tapes have been in the public domain for many years so that we've already heard much about Nixon's paranoia and bigotry. The film is entertaining, but the overall point seems to be that Nixon was a flawed human being. I think we knew that already.

Robert Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin all worked as insiders in Richard Nixon's White House. They had one other thing in common: all three apparently liked to take home movies, and they took a lot of them during their time on Nixon's staff. Given the medium, this turns out to be basically what you would expect - not a documentary filled with new revelations about Watergate or Vietnam, but a personal look at the centre of power; a voyeuristic experience for the viewer more than anything.

Nixon was a complicated man. A consummate politician whose public persona was nothing like the private man. But that's already well documented. This film merely reinforces what we basically already knew about him.

Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chapin are all spliced into this in excerpts from later interviews. The most interesting part of this is probably from those interviews when they discuss the fallout from Watergate, that eventually led to all three of them resigning from the White House and eventually serving time in prison. Otherwise, there's not much new information about anything to be found here, but it is a voyeur's delight. (7/10)