The first time Joan Allen is seen in Oliver Stone’s epic political biography “Nixon,” playing the 37th American president’s tortured wife, Pat, she’s in a TV control room watching a monitor of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. The tension and awkwardness that constituted Pat Nixon’s public persona is evoked in Allen’s intensely physical interpretation.
In the debate, a pale, withered Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) struggles against his suave Democratic counterpart. As he fails to construct a cogent answer on the issue of Cuba, Nixon’s difficulties are mirrored in his wife’s clenched, overwrought expressions. Powerless to intervene, her sense of disappointment and failure is extreme.
Whether in the rigid way she holds a cigarette or the cold manner in which she rests her arm, Allen reveals Pat Nixon’s unease. And in a stylistically ambitious film that spans varied political and cultural eras, she shifts deftly from the ambitious and beautiful young college woman courted by a persistent and indefatigable Nixon to a tormented mother and wife whose frozen, immaculate traits earned her the disparaging sobriquet “plastic Pat.”
Opening Wednesday, the $43 million “Nixon” is an expansive consideration of America’s most enigmatic 20th Century political leader, serving as both deconstruction and rehabilitation of Nixon’s complicated image. In relating the dramatically potent narrative of Nixon’s life and times (using as text the Alger Hiss case, the Checkers speech, Vietnam, the invasion of Cambodia, Watergate and his subsequent resignation), Stone sketches a man of massive contradictions, an intellectually skilled and strategically agile president whose career was shattered by his own self-destruction and petty, often unfounded grievances.
In a work studded by audacious casting choices (James Woods as H.R. Haldeman, Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger and David Hyde Pierce as John Dean), Allen is Stone’s shrewdest, most intuitive choice. Where the bulk of the material is a riff on the known, the scenes between Hopkins and Allen represent an intelligent, forceful investigation into the unknown.
Allen has received high marks for her uncanny verisimilitude. “The first time I saw (Allen) in those clothes on the set, I thought I was watching Pat Nixon,” says Alexander Butterfield, the one-time top Nixon aide who revealed the existence of those surreptitious tape recordings in 1973 and acted, with John Dean, as the film’s adviser. “Joan got everything right, the voice, the gestures, the mannerisms. She captured Pat Nixon perfectly,” he says.
Indeed, Allen loses herself in a part balancing sulfurous black wit and terrifying anguish brought on by her husband’s indifference. Allen and Hopkins even suggest an untapped sexual energy between the two, at least in the scenes unfolding in the late ’60s following Richard Nixon’s political resurrection. One of the film’s most important themes, the divide between ideals and feelings, comes out in their relationship.
“I knew I already had Anthony Hopkins,” Stone says. “My idea was to get as good an actor as I could opposite him. I didn’t have to worry about box-office stars.”
In person, Allen is Pat Nixon’s physical opposite, tall and supermodel thin, graced by a seemingly innate ease and comfort. Sitting in a Manhattan hotel, she is poised and loose, though already slightly overwhelmed by the industry and press speculation that this film role could result in an Academy Award nomination.
In Chicago, Allen’s stunning turn is hardly a surprise, but a continuation of her work as a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble she joined in 1977.
If Steppenwolf’s signature aesthetic is the physicality of its productions, Allen works in a wholly different vein at once more ethereal and textured. She has done outstanding film work in the past (especially in Michael Mann’s 1986 thriller “Manhunter,” as a blind woman in an unusual relationship with a serial killer), but her taut, lonely Pat Nixon is the perfect showcase.
Allen says the key to her impersonation was locating the physical underpinnings of the part. Like her husband, Pat Nixon felt a deep revulsion to the body, a discomfort resulting in her frequent withdrawal from public consciousness.
“I wanted to try and be as close physically to (Pat Nixon) as I possibly could,” Allen says. “There wasn’t a lot of footage on her because she was very private. She hated to be interviewed; it made her nervous and uncomfortable. There was a 10-minute interview she did with Barbara Waters in 1972 and I watched that about one hundred times.
“I watched her physical life. It was in my mind to be able to try and recreate that. It’s wonderful as an actor to see something right in front of your eyes and try and duplicate that with your own body,” she says.
“I give Oliver a lot of credit, because I think he worked on these scenes the hardest. He really was constantly shaping, refining and fleshing those scenes out. I don’t think there was a great deal of (physical love) between them. But I love the fact that Oliver shows at one point there was that in their lives. As the years went on, there was not, especially during the White House years. There was a great deal of separation,” she says.
Since his 1991 film “The Doors,” Stone has become the most experimental of Hollywood directors. Like the heatedly debated “JFK” and “Natural Born Killers,” “Nixon” is on one level an effort to expand on the parameters of film grammar and storytelling. Stone shoots in color and black and white, plays around with different film stock, using fake newsreel footage and found materials to create a dizzying and impressionistic portrait.
“I always found it very exciting that I never knew when I came to the set if Oliver was going to be using black and white or color, if (cinematographer Robert Richardson) was going to be swinging the camera over our shoulder. You never quite knew what was going to happen. I was quite exhilarated by that. It wasn’t tiring,” she says.
“Nixon” represents the most amazing part of Allen’s odyssey from Rochelle, the small farming community 75 miles west of Chicago where she grew up the youngest of four children, to her commanding body of work at Steppenwolf, on Broadway and in television and film. Her family was the prototypical faction of Nixon’s “silent majority,” conservative, disciplined, “a little bit more controlled, not the kind that got over emotional,” she says.
“In high school, I wanted to be a cheerleader, because I wanted to be popular. I started acting in some plays. I wanted to meet boys. I was extremely shy. I used to think, `Maybe some day, some boy will kiss me.’ I remember thinking, when I was in high school, you could walk onto the stage and express all of these emotions in a very safe environment,” she says.
“I have a nature very much to please people. I never wanted to make waves. In a play you can make all the waves you want and people clap for it, if you’re good,” she says.
While studying acting at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, she met actor John Malkovich and he invited her to join the Steppenwolf ensemble. She finished her degree at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, and upon graduation in 1978, plunged into her work. She moved to New York in 1983.
Though she won a Tony Award for her part in Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This,” playing opposite Malkovich, Allen hasn’t appeared on stage since Frank Galati’s adaptation of Anne Tyler’s novel “Earthly Possessions” four years ago. “I have no desire to do a play right now. That may change at some point but I have to go with what I’m feeling. I don’t want to put myself in that position because it’s too difficult,” she says.
Allen recently completed filming on “The Crucible,” adapted by Arthur Miller from his play and directed by the English theater director and filmmaker Nicholas Hytner (“The Madness of King George”). Allen plays the pivotal role of Elizabeth Proctor opposite Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. She is also intent on spending time with her family, her husband, actor Robert Friedman, and their 21-month-old daughter, Rachel. But she cannot contain the excitement of what “Nixon” portends.
“In terms of my own career, this is quite significant. It’s the first time in the films I’ve done where I’ve received this kind of recognition. Oliver’s films always get a certain amount of attention, and I knew this would get more attention than any film I worked on. Whether it would be positive, negative or what, I had no idea. I just knew people would pay attention to it,” she says.
