Initial Review

Secret Honor - Review

Watched 17 September 2026, 4 stars

Paranoid mama's boy Richard Nixon reckons with his life as a pawn.

This was actually an inadvertently neat companion piece to Swimming to Cambodia (1987); both one-man shows that are nearly in conversation with each other.

In Swimming, Spalding Gray (as himself) describes his time spent in Cambodia filming a fictional portrayal of a real-life event.

In Honor, Philip Baker Hall gives a stunning performance as Nixon in a fictional moment of his life (that I guess could've happened) that deals in part with the real-life events discussed in Swimming.

(It's also just wild that all of Robert Altman's signature moves work just as well here with one man as they do in a story with, like, 32 people talking all at once.)