If one can say nothing
else good about Richard Nixon, we can stipulate that the most cringe-inducing moments
in Emile de Antonio’s Millhouse: a White Comedy belong not to the 37th
President but to Bob Hope, seen cracking some wretched jokes at the expense of
the gay-themed movie Staircase. That aside, much about de Antonio’s film
inevitably lands differently in an age of unbound Trump: it’s commented and
illustrated that Nixon’s policies regularly serve the interests of the elitist
class, that he smears his opponents, that his statements don’t always align
with the facts, but by current standards, he seems virtually quaint as an
embodiment of such transgressions. The film’s broadest strokes – such as
imposing extracts of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech over one of
Nixon’s own, presumably to evoke a gap both in vision and rhetorical power, or
contrasting an optimistic economic assessment with something comparably upbeat
delivered by Herbert Hoover before the great depression – feel more laboured
than insightful, and even if considered as a record of its own time and place
and culture, it often seems more ambiguous than perhaps intended. For instance,
de Antonio includes the “Checkers” speech in largely unexpurgated form, and
while elements of that now seem clunky, it also has a degree of methodical self-exposure
(Nixon, seemingly diligently, sets out all his personal assets and liabilities)
that doesn’t readily invite straightforward mockery on its own terms (on the contrary,
he remains fascinating in his contradictions, somehow at once both deeply off-putting
and poignant, both strategically astute and hapless). In truth, the film asserts
Nixon’s inadequacy and wretchedness more than it dissects and demonstrates it,
a rhetorical excess also evident elsewhere in de Antonio’s work (In the King
of Prussia for example is limitingly one-sided, notwithstanding the
viewer’s likely broad agreement with that side).
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