As controversial 37th president Richard Nixon, Anthony Hopkins is repeatedly juxtaposed against framed portraits of historical icons: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. The visual equivalents may come as a surprise from the director of Born on the Fourth of July, given that Nixon’s misguided nuclear strategies kindled the fire depicted in that film’s wound-up protagonist. But Stone’s pageant for a powerful and conflicted man, much like his later W (2008), casts a lucid, if not quite forgiving, eye toward the high-pressure work of the presidency during times of war, an occupation represented here as a faintly hallucinatory procession of ticking-clock conversations in shadowy rooms hermetically sealed from the outside world. Told in jumbled chronology, with monochrome flashbacks to Nixon’s Quaker upbringing in Southern California sprinkled into passages from his political career, the film’s structure bestows a sense of fatalism to Nixon’s tenure, positing his pathological self-pity as his ultimate undoing.