Facts Aside ‘Nixon’ Raises Questions About The Nature Of Objective ‘Truth’ - About The Way Hollywood Handles History

Did Richard Nixon meet at a desert retreat with right-wing zealots who demanded the president guard their interests - or else? Was he haunted by memories of a plot to kill Fidel Castro that - Nixon feared - led instead to the murder of John F. Kennedy? Is it true that Nixon uttered a profound goodbye to a portrait of Kennedy before leaving the White House in disgrace?

Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Nixon,” is a provocative, personal view of the 37th president that festoons the empirical record with rosettes of hunch and hype and artful interpolation. And though far less fanciful and flamboyant than Stone’s overwrought 1991 flick “JFK,” the new film raises questions about the limits of creative license and the nature of objective “truth” - about the way Hollywood handles history.

As portrayed in Stone’s film, Nixon is driven, and ultimately devoured, by ambition and arrogance. Though the Nixon family has dismissed the movie as “erroneous and malicious,” many will view it as a remarkably human portrait of a leader who often seemed emotionally anemic - a rendering more sympathetic than a contrary director like Stone might have been expected to deliver.

Has Nixon, then, at last been revealed? Has Oliver Stone solved the psychological riddle that stumped Nixon-watchers for decades? Is “Nixon” really Nixon? Don’t bet on it. Film buffs and historians say that if American moviegoers expect reality from Stone - or any other director - they’re bound to be disappointed.

Homer and Shakespeare fiddled with the facts, and their counterparts in contemporary cinema do the same. Remember, entertainment is the primary mission of movies. Enlightenment is another matter.

“No movie or play can accurately depict the complex infinity of the past,” said Mark C. Carnes, history department chairman at Barnard College and editor of a new book called “Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.” “There is no point bemoaning the liberties taken by dramatists because they are going to take them anyway.” Filmmakers are devoted first to art - not authenticity - and must always keep the demands of the marketplace in mind, Carnes said. “A degree of skepticism is absolutely essential when going to a feature film - particularly a big, expensive feature film.”

If a healthy dose of skepticism helps, so does the realization that movies, like all forms of art, are apt to say as much about practitioners of the craft as their subjects - and about audiences, as well. One person hates the director for overstating the case, another thinks the filmmaker manipulated the facts in brilliant fashion to arrive at a greater truth.

Directors have always cut themselves slack. D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 movie, “Birth of a Nation,” is widely viewed as a cinematic masterpiece, but his view of the South after the Civil War was retrograde, at best.

A few recent movies - the coal mine saga “Matewan” (1987) by director John Sayles, for example, and Bruce Beresford’s “Black Robe” (1991) dealing with 17th-century Jesuits who tried to convert the Huron Indians of Canada - drew admiring notices for accuracy, but there are plenty of examples suggesting that most filmmakers, past and present, don’t let the details ruin a good story.

“It’s in the nature of drama that if something lasts two hours on the screen it will require condensation,” said Jonathan Kuntz, who teaches a course in the history of American cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Most important is to be true to the spirit of the event.”

A generation ago, moviemakers were not always held to such high standards. If the movie worked, it worked - and that was the truth of the matter.

The 1983 movie “Silkwood,” about a whistle-blower in the nuclear-power industry, made some critics furious because of what they felt was its diabolical, and unsubstantiated, subtext (specifically, that Karen Silkwood was killed by her employers).

Spike Lee got static from some critics for his selective use of biographical material in the 1992 movie “Malcolm X,” and Alan Parker was singed for exalting the FBI and neglecting black heroes - in the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning,” based on the case of three slain civil rights workers.

Oliver Stone’s ability to make hypothesis seem like history may be without parallel. His cinematic techniques are devilishly convincing, and for many moviegoers it simply is impossible to tell where the facts stop and Stone begins rolling.