Kicking Around TNT’s ‘Nixon’

Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean we don’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore. So here come dueling Tricky Dickeys.

One of this month’s safest bets is that TNT’s new “Kissinger and Nixon”--would you buy a used car from either of these shiny suits?--will be measured against Oliver Stone’s thicker, splashier, costlier, about-to-premiere theatrical movie “Nixon,” with Beau Bridges and Anthony Hopkins jowl to jowl as the furtive force who somehow clung to the mantle of respected elder guru after resigning the presidency in 1974 to avoid being impeached. As someone later said of him, the only way to stop Nixon was to drive a stake through his heart.

Whether “Nixon” and Hopkins do that posthumously remains to be seen. On Sunday, the entertaining “Kissinger and Nixon” wastes no time spinning its own hat into the ring by having Nixon (Bridges) practically open the movie by bellowing to aides, “Where the hell’s my Jew boy?”

You’re instantly engaged, for the “Jew boy” he’s crudely summoning like a courtier is his own national security advisor and future secretary of state, that formidable chameleon Henry Kissinger (Ron Silver).

In contrast to Stone’s Nixon-centered saga, Kissinger is an ever-present co-star in TNT’s movie, which is based largely on the portion of Walter Isaacson’s fine monograph “Kissinger: A Biography,” covering a 16-week period in 1972-73 when Nixon and Kissinger were at odds on how and when the United States should disengage from Vietnam.

Disengagement from “Kissinger and Nixon” is never an issue, so persuasive is Silver as Kissinger and so completely, intimately and seductively does Lionel Chetwynd’s script immerse us in the stench and choking sewage of egos, secret agendas and Machiavellian muck that clogged Nixon’s inner chamber via Vietnam just prior to the pot blowing on what he cavalierly waves off here as “that stupid Watergate business.”

Respectful when face-to-face, Nixon dismisses Kissinger to others as “an elitist suck-up,” while Kissinger, behind his boss’ back, calls Nixon a “madman.”

But not an anti-Semite. “I don’t think he would have taken that from anyone else,” Chetwynd said recently about Kissinger’s reported turning of the other cheek in response to Nixon’s alleged anti-Jewish slurs. “I don’t think that in his heart Nixon was an anti-Semite. It was not meant as a put-down. This is just the way the man was.”

Bridges’ own take on what Nixon was borders on caricature. Given Nixon-like looks by makeup artists Kevin Haney and Patricia Green, Bridges leans toward the exaggerated Dan Aykroyd in Nixon, with a mannered, mechanical impression in which everything starts from the surface and remains there. As a Nixon of record, it’s a thin performance that recedes with Nixon’s hairline.

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Yet Silver, beyond being a startling look-alike and sound-alike, projects the very essence of what has been said and written about Kissinger, to the core a complex fusion of smug, arrogant intellectualism and personal insecurity--the brilliant, driven neo-Metternich campaigning for stability in a nuclear age with wit and personal charm to burn, his flair for duplicitous flattery paired with his hypocritical playing of the toadie to Nixon’s face.

His own face a sleepy mask, Silver lets his eyes alone betray Kissinger’s inner sweat while carefully walking political high wires in the Oval Office.

Directed by veteran Daniel Petrie, “Kissinger and Nixon” wallows wonderfully while presenting the curious, mistrustful personal relationship between its two wary, privately scheming protagonists during this critical period. Kissinger is shown working to secure a Vietnam peace pact with Hanoi before the 1972 election; Nixon, counseled by H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and Charles Colson, is just as determined to put it off until afterward.

On board as Nixon’s Deep Throat is Kissinger’s ambitious deputy, Alexander Haig (a miscast Matt Frewer), forged here as a devious backstabber deluxe who advances his own career by spying on Kissinger and trying mightily to sabotage his boss’ “peace is at hand” initiative.

Meanwhile, Kissinger utilizes his own back channels with friendly journalists, feeding self-serving leaks to influential James Reston of the New York Times.

Although Kissinger’s sneakiness has a somewhat higher purpose, both he and Nixon are devoutly unheroic, and this movie manages to be absorbing without presenting anyone to care or cheer for. What Chetwynd concluded from his research--which he says included the Isaacson book and other sources, but not Kissinger, for fear of being seduced by a particular viewpoint--is the following: “The challenge of politics is enormous, that a career in public is not simply going to be what you believe is right, and that you can’t separate politics from personality.”

What Kissinger concluded from a script he saw months ago, his attorney, former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, has said, is that “Kissinger and Nixon” contained “defamatory material . . . contradicted by the historical record.” Kissinger listed his objections in a 42-page letter to Chetwynd and his co-executive producers, and claims in the current issue of TV Guide that the TNT film “brazenly reverses history” and that his criticisms were rejected by the producers.

“We’ve not heard from him since then,” Chetwynd said. “We’ve communicated with him by rumor. He sees his place in history in a very, very special way. What he doesn’t like is that as an historical figure, he’s subject to the scrutiny of Hollywood screenwriters. All of his criticisms have to be seen in that light.”

As the legal disclaimer atop this movie states, history is “subject to interpretation.” And the first obligation of a filmmaker depicting history is “to put your own politics aside,” said Chetwynd, who’s known as a “neo-conservative,” his professed liberal views on social issues belying a belief that liberalism “has failed to take into account notions of personal responsibility.”

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The steady drum roll of Chetwynd’s long run as a successful screenwriter culminated with the Emmy he received in September for the TNT movie “Joseph.” Yet hardly biblical was the job famine he says he endured after “Hanoi Hilton,” a 1987 film about the plight of American POWs that some saw only as a right-wing ambush of anti-Vietnam War activists. Chetwynd wrote and directed it, making him a tougher sale in an industry whose politics tilted liberal.

“Eyebrows were raised after ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ ” Chetwynd said. “Things were very difficult for me and my agent. My phone was very quiet during that period. This is the first overtly political thing I’ve done since then. But there are a new set of buyers in Hollywood now.”

And a set of U.S. viewers, one hopes, whose interest in revisiting our past and re-examining our political leaders will be nourished by “Kissinger and Nixon.”

* “Kissinger and Nixon” airs Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. on TNT.