Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Peter Morgan
Starring Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Hall
Release Date December 5th, 2008
Published December 4th, 2008
Need and desperation defines Frost/Nixon, a battle of wits between two men of completely different wit. David Frost (Michael Sheen) was a television host whose stardom was on the wane. Having lost his American talk show, Frost was working in Australia with the occasional English special. Frost longed to get back the spotlight and especially get back the celebrity he'd enjoyed in the United States. His longshot bet to get it back was an interview no one thought he could get. 3 years after having been impeached and pardoned, Richard Nixon was living in exile in California and longing for a comeback of his own.
Though his memoirs meant alot to him, he was getting nearly a million dollars for his story, a near record at the time, the writing process was lonely and he longed for a national spotlight. Nixon had standing offers from all of the network big wigs but people like Mike Wallace had too much power and would not accept limitations on the kinds of pointed questions they could ask. David Frost on the other hand had no power. He had no stature to make demands and his reputation for softball celebrity interviews gave no indication that he would make a difficult interview for the cagey former President. Frost also offered something else the networks refused, he was willing to pay for the interview.
Feeling he could interest a network or syndicator later, Frost willingly put every penny he had into paying for the interview from several hundred thousand for the President to the very production and recording of the interview. Even without the assurance that he would have a venue to air the interview. Frost may not have been in much of a position to intimidate the former President but he was crafty. With the help of his longtime producer John Birt (Matthew Macfaydyen), Frost found a pair of top flight investigators to help write the questions and prep the interviews.
Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) was a former ABC News producer and James Reston Jr (Sam Rockwell) was a Watergate scholar having already written several books in just the three years since the President's downfall. It was Reston, the zealot, who saw the interview as the opportunity to give Nixon the trial he never had. Frost/Nixon began life as a two man stage play written by playwright Peter Morgan. He dramatized the conversations between Frost and Nixon on camera and off and in so doing gave audiences unique insight into these two extraordinarily different personalities.
It is also Peter Morgan who turned his two man play into a multi-character screenplay and his care and craftsmanship is why so little of the drama and tension has been lost by the addition of characters and scenes away from the actual interviews. Ron Howard proves to be the perfect director for this material. A mainstream auteur, Howard knows how to please an audience and do so without making things insultingly easy to follow. His knack for real life drama shown in two Best Picture nominees, Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, is very much on display in Frost/Nixon.
When Nixon says to Frost "When the President does it, it isn't a crime" even the most ardent Republican could not miss the obvious allusion to things that Dick Cheney has come oh so close to saying himself in numerous interviews about the Iraq war and other scandalous events of the Bush administration. President Bush also, to a lesser extent, when it comes to issues of rendition and torture, has walked the line of nearly saying the same thing about Presidential power.
The key to Howard's direction of that scene, that approach to Nixon’s abuse of power and its historic context, and of the subtext as a whole, is not to overplay or underline the point. The moment in the movie is breathtaking both for the subtext provided in recent American history and for how it plays between Nixon and Frost. As Frost pauses not knowing how to react to such an extraordinary answer, the moment hangs in the air like a sword over both of their heads. Can Frost follow up? Does he need to? Can Nixon recover? This is one of three breathtaking moments in this movie, the other two I will leave you to discover.
Frank Langella's Nixon is a wounded soul who you almost come to sympathize with. Almost. I am among those who could never forgive such horrendous corruption. But, seeing Frost/Nixon, you get an impression of a man with great conviction. A man who, if he were not so paranoid and power mad, could have been a great President. Michael Sheen meanwhile, is very effective as David Frost, capturing both the blow dried pretty boy and the feisty, crafty scoundrel who may have been just the right man for the job. In the end it was Frost who cemented Nixon's image in our minds. Some revisionists may claim that Nixon came away better for the interview but those Watergate moments are the ones that people will always take away.
Frost/Nixon is one of the best films of 2008.
