The
great and uncompromisingly unconventional auteur Robert Altman, after a string
of both big screen hits and misses (Popeye being his biggest commercial
failure at the time), shifted his focus away from the studio system towards
smaller lower-budgeted indie fare typically based on stage plays. Between 1982 and 1985, the filmmaker who
began teaching at the University of Michigan directed five features in the vein
of tightly produced projects. Among them
was an adaptation of playwright Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone's scathing and incendiary
monologue of historical fiction Secret Honor.
Prominently
featuring actor Philip Baker Hall, a then-unknown actor who reprised his role
from stage to screen, the film is a fictionalized query into the life of
Richard Nixon. Depicting the disgraced
president in a single library in his New Jersey home prior to his resignation, Secret
Honor watches Nixon for about ninety-minutes, armed with a revolver, Scotch
whisky and a tape recorder and ornate security system. While minimalist in form, Philip Baker Hall
all but completely attacks the role with such virulent ferocity covering
virtually every emotional and psychological base, making the collegiate
production soar.
The
film leaves little wonder as to why Philip Baker Hall was featured so
prominently in Paul Thomas Anderson’s first three features, who is such a powerful
force of nature here you feel like you’re in the eye of a hurricane. Foul mouthed, stuttering, quick to interrupt
himself mid-sentence in a frenetic outpouring of words and feelings, you can
palpably feel the paranoia and anxiety coming off the man. Though Hall doesn’t look like Nixon physically
and the film makes it known immediately we’re watching a work of speculative
fiction, his intensity is so great and his mastery of Nixon’s mannerisms so
complete that we blindly accept him as the disgraced president himself.
Filmed
with the participation of students of the University of Michigan and shot on
campus, Secret Honor neither validates nor dispels notions people
harbored about the controversial political figure, instead offering a
nonjudgmental, quasi-sympathetic portrait of a man in turmoil, depression and
rage. Playwright Donald Freed himself
was on Nixon’s hitlist and Altman made no secret of his hatred for Nixon. For the film to maintain something of a detached
documentary eye, lensed darkly in heavy browns by Pierre Mignot, is kind of
remarkable.
Whatever
your preconceived notions are about the legacy of Richard Nixon, a frequent
favorite subject of cinematic dramatizations, supporters and detractors alike
will indeed come away floored by Hall’s frankly astonishing performance. Yes the film wears the stage play roots with
pride and at times it does feel made for television despite getting a
theatrical release anyway. No the film
doesn’t come close to the grandiosity of Altman’s The Long Goodbye or Short
Cuts. But for the brief period which
Altman dealt in making lean mean independent pictures, Secret Honor is
something of a clandestine knockout, a little giant of a film from one of
cinema’s greatest directors.
--Andrew Kotwicki
