The Unexpected Mrs. Nixon, Superstar

Hollywood has always had a soft spot for movies about presidents. Both satiric comedies and heartfelt dramas have featured an American president in a leading role. There’s even a musical—an adaptation of the stage hit 1776—that features the song stylings of future U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

 Of all the American. presidents, it is Abraham Lincoln who has earned the most screen time. He’s been portrayed by Walter Huston in 1930; by Henry Fonda (as Young Mr. Lincoln) in 1939; by Raymond Massey in 1940’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois; and by an Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis in 2012’s Steven Spielberg Civil War-era epic, simply called Lincoln. This is not to mention a more eccentric 2012 flick, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

 Among 20^th century American presidents, the inspirational story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt contending with polio gave rise to 1960’s Sunrise at Campobello. Oliver Stone’s  JFK (1991) is less about John F. Kennedy than about the nagging questions behind his assassination. The up-and-down career of Bill Clinton was pseudonymously handled in 1998’s Primary Colors, in which John Travolta portrays a Clinton-like presidential rogue.

 Then there’s Richard Nixon, whose checkered presidency has been scrutinized in everything from a biographical drama (1995’s Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins) to an intimate fact-based post-resignation film (2008’s Frost/Nixon) to a wacky comedy, 1999’s Dick. In all of these settings, there’s a role for First Lady Pat Nixon, but she’s always a peripheral character.

 That remains true of most First Ladies. Moviemakers are not terribly interested in their stories, except as they intersect with their husbands’ moments of high drama. (The one big exception is Jacqueline Kennedy, whose post-White House life as the tragic young widow of JFK confirmed her movie star potential. Natalie Portman portrayed her in 2016’s Jackie, earning herself an Oscar nomination.)

 I don’t think anyone is about to make a movie with Patricia Ryan Nixon at its center. In her lifetime (1912-1993), Pat was known as the spouse of Dick Nixon, as an apparently prim and proper helpmeet good at smiling and waving. But my friend and colleague, Heath Hardage Lee, has recently published a biography that turns the spotlight on someone who preferred to remain in the background. Lee’s book, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady, was recently named to the longlist for Biographers International Organization’s prestigious 2025 Plutarch Award. This well-researched biography explores Pat Nixon’s many appealing qualities—her personal grit, her great skill as a goodwill ambassador roaming the world on the nation’s behalf, her strong commitment to preserving her country’s history and institutions. There’s also, eventually, some revelations about the way her husband’s shadier aides tried—in the second Nixon term—to curb her enthusiasm for the First Lady’s traditional mandate to further her spouse’s White House goals. To read about Pat’s efforts to enhance the role of women in American government and on its courts is to be impressed by a First Lady who was in some ways well ahead of her time.

 Heath Lee’s book, which contains the fruits of interviews with many Nixon aides, friends, and family members, portrays its subject as a woman well worth knowing, even by those who were not fans of her husband’s politics. One of many surprises: Pat and Dick had a cordial and long-lasting relationship with Jack and Jackie Kennedy, both before and after the brutal 1960 presidential race that set them against one another. What I learned in reading The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon is that it’s fascinating to read about the woman who willingly stood behind the famous man.

 

 

May December : The Crashing of Symbols

The old song says it: “It’s a long, long while from May to December.” As a film about the consequences of long-ago horrific behavior, May December sounds more interesting than it is. As a Todd Haynes project featuring two of Hollywood’s boldest actresses, May December is most surprising in that it’s a male character  (and a relative Hollywood newcomer) who largely captures our attention. The premise is intriguing: an older woman (Julianne Moore) once shocked the nation with a series of horrific acts, which involved a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old boy, whom she later (following a jail term and the birth of a baby while incarcerated) married. Into her small-town domestic life, some two decades after all this sturm und drang, comes an ambitious young actress (Natalie Portman) who’s planning to star in an indie film in which she portrays the female half of the mismatched couple.

  I came into the film curious to see how the two women would evolve, and how one might influence the other. I’m leaving aside here the question of how a radiant performer like Moore could (at 63, though her character must be slightly younger) represent December. In the film, she’s—from start to finish—a happy housewife, doting on her three kids and her hunky (much younger) husband. Any doubts she might have about the unbalanced nature of her marriage to a 36-year-old seem non-existent, from start to finish. The result: I didn’t much enjoy watching her onscreen. It’s only near the very end, when she says something about her troubled older child from a previous marriage that may or may not be true, that I started to wonder if there was more to her character than a placid, rather addled, acceptance of the status quo.

 I had wondered, too, if this film might be an exploration of merging identities, somewhat in the way that Bibi Andersson’s and Liv Ullmann’s characters seem to coalesce in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona. This may be the filmmakers’ goal, but I mostly remember Portman wandering around Moore’s small town, taking notes as she unearths character nuggets from Moore’s screen family and friends. Though, as a buttinsky, she’s treated with a surprising amount of courtesy by everyone she meets, there’s an air of Hollywood fakery about her. This seems confirmed when—late in the film—she turns a moment of compassion into something different, something definitely predatory. And then, at the film’s conclusion, we see her in character, playing Moore’s Gracie in a way that seems to undercut our previous sense that she’s on Gracie’s side.

 Writing this, I realize that the film sounds quite provocative. But it’s also infernally slow, scored with doleful music and missing any real spark of life. Both female leads lacked appeal for me; the only character for whom I felt compassion was the young husband (the critically praised Charles Melton), trapped in a domesticity that doesn’t match up with his biological stage in life. He’s the one who has, appropriately, garnered most of the film’s awards this season, for delineating the awkward tension between his character’s role as pater familias and a  young man’s restless wish to explore the wider world. Still, his hobby of tending the cocoons of monarch butterflies is so obviously meant to be symbolic of his own personal needs that it quickly becomes irksome.

 The story of May December is clearly based on the long-ago case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her much-underage paramour, Vili Fualaau. An L.A, Times columnist notes that Fualaau, still alive at 41, wishes the world would stay away from his tricky story. 

 

"Annihilation": Gals with Guns

Here there be spoilers. 

Sometimes the audiences are smarter than the critics. Though science fiction is not my favorite genre, I went to see Annihilation because a family member went to high school with Tessa Thompson, a rising star who plays one of the five brainy, gutsy women (Natalie Portman leads the pack) at the center of the drama. Tessa was always a charmer, and I wanted to check out what she was up to. Then there was the fact that the writer and director of Annihilation, Alex Garland, had earlier given us Ex Machina, an eerily effective thriller about all-too-human robots. And the critics I read made Annihilation sound both visually stunning and intellectually fascinating: a cerebral mind-game with art-film overtones (think Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky). 

Don’t believe everything you read. I saw the film on a Saturday night in a nearly empty theatre, an indication of the public’s general disdain for the blather that Annihilation puts forth as challenging futuristic ideas. Yes, it’s potentially of interest that, within the mysterious force-field known as “the shimmer,” the DNA of various species (including the human) recombines to form new beings. But I never got the sense that anyone had bothered to think through the implications of this concept. Questions abound. Like -- why is the fate of each member of Portman’s all-female team of scientists and general bad-asses so different? Why – spoiler alert -- is Portman the only one of the five who makes it through to the end of the movie? I’ve tried to logic this out, and come up with the only possible conclusion: Portman’s character survives, in a shell-shocked but still fundamentally human state, because she’s the star of the movie.

Over the years, when working with writers and directors, I’ve clung to a basic principle when it comes to screenplays: you’ve got to know the rules of your world. Even if – especially if -- you’re dealing in fantasy or science fiction, the filmmakers need to grasp the parameters of what they’re creating. Not that the audience must be force-fed every crumb of information: we viewers often have to do some mental work in order to be rewarded with an understanding of what’s going on.  The trouble is that in Annihilation I didn’t feel anyone had a full grasp of the world the film sets in motion. You can only get so far why saying that the universe is a mysterious place. 

Here’s an example of the vagueness that had me so frustrated: lots of screen-time is devoted to hints about Portman’s marriage to a soldier (Oscar Isaac) who had gone missing on a mysterious mission, but then resurfaces under strange conditions. Late in the film we discover that she’s had a passionate affair with another man, and that she suspects that Isaac suspects. OK, but how does this tie into anything? Personally, I think her romantic complications are just the filmmakers’ excuse to throw another sex scene into the mix. 

Then there are her comrades in arms, Tessa Thompson among them. Their backstories are summed up in a sentence or so, full of hints about past traumas. But, frankly, these women seem to have no interior lives. Nor, really, does Portman. Why the heck did she serve several tours of duty in the military (developing weaponry expertise) before becoming a professor of biology? Call me a Roger Corman-style cynic, but I think the all-female cadre of scientists on this mission is just an excuse for enticing scenes of Gals with Guns. 

Intellectual mind-games? How about intellectual claptrap? Watching this movie pretty much annihilated me.