Frost/Nixon

Rating

Director

Ron Howard

Screenplay

Peter Morgan (His Play)

Length

122 min.

Starring

Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Toby Jones, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon, Matthew Macfadyen, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Andy Milder, Kate Jennings Grant, Gabriel Jarret, Jim Meskimen, Patty McCormack

MPAA Rating

R for some language.

Review

It’s a difficult task taking a Broadway stage play and translating it to the big screen without making it feel stagebound. Frost/Nixon is the perfect example of how to make that translation.

Based around the famous four-part interview between television personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) and former, disgraced United States President Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella), the movie explores a fascinating segment of US history: the only time where a president resigned his position which was due to a criminal investigation surrounding the infamous Watergate scandal. The film does plenty to refresh the memories of the audience members about the circumstances surrounding the interviews.

The interviews, conducted in 1977 were financed almost entirely by a zealous Frost who wanted to bag the biggest interview of his career while launching his career as a serious newsman. Sheen does a strong job showing the audience the internal debates that lead him from the softball approach that characterizes most of his celebrity interviews to the hard-hitting newsworthy approach that nets him a tacit confession to the crimes Nixon never, thanks to Gerald Ford’s pardon, went through.

Other important figures surround Frost as he digs up information in preparation for the interviews, each hoping to corner Nixon into a full fledged confession and seek a manner of catharsis after the emotional and psychological turmoil the former president put the nation through. Among them are James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), one of the key players doing the research; John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen), Frost’s producer/friend who questions his motives at times and works tirelessly to make sure he isn’t doing the wrong thing; and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), the man who talks Reston into joining the team and mostly acts as political satire expert for the gathering and provides very little rhetorical input. These are also the players who spend much of the film flashing back to the interviews, for it’s their memories and not the actual event that we’re witnessing. None of these actors are overly memorable or more than solid in their portrayals.

Meanwhile, Nixon has only one advisor, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) who seems to be presented as a bodyguard more than anything, but his adamant support of the ex-president is compelling and easily among Bacon’s best work in some time.

But, really, although the title is Frost/Nixon, the film belongs to one man: Frank Langella. His performance as Richard Milhouse Nixon is superb. Delving into the emotional complexities of a man who, at the time, was one of the most reviled men in America and remains a point of contention among historical scholars and presidential historians, Langella shows us the vulnerability of a man who did what he thought was right, even when it was wrong, stood by his convictions and never relented. The film portrays him as an accomplished, yet seriously flawed man and Peter Morgan’s script does a fantastic job of highlighting his service through Nixon’s own words.

It’s difficult to look at a man like Nixon and see anything more than the crook he proclaimed himself not to be. History has shown that his actions were atrocious and everything surrounding Watergate was a mire of questionable and downright wrongheaded decisions, but those same history books don’t look at what he did as a man or who he was as a person and Frost/Nixon, more than anything, gives us a relatively unbiased look at the man himself, which the “historical” film Nixon from Oliver Stone failed to do on a number of levels.

It’s hard not to compare Langella to Anthony Hopkins who played Stone’s version of “Tricky Dick” because the material they are given seems so diametrically opposed, but in a direct comparison, Langella not only wins hands down, his performance is stratospheric.

Director Ron Howard may not be the most gifted director in the world. Most of his films range from vanilla to bland with Apollo 13 as the lone stand out. However, Frost/Nixon is a step in the right direction. While there’s nothing entirely compelling about his filmmaking style, he molds the material in a pleasing and comprehensible way that guides the audience through this fascinating history lesson.

Of course, that could be entirely based on the meticulous and well-crafted screenplay by Peter Morgan. Based on his own play, Morgan does a tremendous job stacking historical reference and blending in drama to create a cohesive drama. Like he did with 2006’s The Queen, Morgan takes fact and fiction and drives his narrative home to the audience without feeling heavy handed or preachy. And despite his tendency towards these traits, Howard keeps them in check and the final result is something that both history professors and the inexpert can enjoy.

Review Written

December 5, 2008