By Harvey Karten - By coincidence, Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon," which the director opened up cinematically from Peter Morgan's stage play, is being released at about the same time as Darron Aronofsky's "The Wrestler." In a way, the two movies are more alike than, say, "Frost/Nixon" and "W" because the former is a no-holds-barred, gloves-off contest while "W" is, by contrast, a wax-work. "Frost/Nixon," logically enough, pits David Frost (Michael Sheen), a known before the event as a lightweight talk-show host known for womanizing, with Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella), the only U.S. President who resigned. For the majority of readers of this review who are under the age of forty and may have heard about Nixon only by descriptions of his five-o'clock shadow, our thirty-fourth Chief Executive, once defeated by John F. Kennedy for the top job in 1960 because of his relatively poor showing on the televised debates, was again vanquished in a one-on-one interview with Frost in 1977, five years after he left the Oval Office for good. What emerges is not what you might have expected: a talking-heads yak-a-thon between characters recognized by much of the world. Instead this docu-drama spends only a relatively short period of its just-over-two-hours' time on segments of the four-part interview, each lasting in real time for ninety minutes. Most of the drama is evoked by backstage preparations, the sorts of brainstorming sessions we all know that the candidates for President and Vice-President went through in the 2008 debates. This time, while Nixon is afforded heavy preparation from his chief adviser, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), Frost himself is virtually bulled by his own. The latter includes journalists James Reston (Sam Rockwell), a bona-fide Nixon hater who counsels Frost to draw blood, and two more moderate fellows, Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), who takes a back seat to the emotional Reston, and John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen).
Universal Pictures/ Imagine Entertainment
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-
Directed by: Ron Howard
Written By: Peter Morgan, from Peter Morgan's play
Cast: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall, Tony Jones, Matthew Macfadyen, Olvier Platt, Sam Rockwell, Patty McCormack, Andy Miller, Kate Jennings Grant, Eve Curtis
Released: December 25, 2008
The results are riveting. Here is a political movie that tramples Oliver Stone's "W" into the dust, making us wonder whether Stone is a sell-out. Director Ron Howard, by contrast, dazzles with a partisan exposition, though he and scripter Morgan are not entirely unsympathetic to poor Mr. Nixon.
As depicted in the film, David Frost, a British talk-show host who is now sixty-nine years of age and who had recently interviewed former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is shown by actor Michael Sheen with the same broad smile that helped defined his charm as Tony Blair in Stephen Frears's Oscar-winning movie "The Queen," One would expect a playboy lightweight to be outclassed in the series of interviews with ex-Prexy Nixon, not someone who put up $200,000 of his own money to pay the man when the major networks turned down his pitch. Flying first-class from Australia, he picks up the sophisticated Monaco resident Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), introducing her to Nixon who did not try to hide his admiration for her beauty. ("Are you fornicating? asks Nixon during one of his informal talks with the journalist.) Like Bush 43, considered by his critics to be a lightweight despite his diploma from Yale, Frost had always hidden his background as a Cambridge University graduate. His pre-taping sessions with Nixon are cordial, as though neither man expects to deliver the kinds of knockout punches sadly missing from the recent U.S. Presidential debates. Langella and Sheen, duplicating their roles in the stage play, never fall into the background, though considerable time is spent looking into the personalities behind the men such as Kevin Bacon's Jack Brennan, who negotiates the rules of the contract with his employer and Swifty Lazar (Toby Jones), an expert at negotiating high payments for the former chief's time.
Nixon, bored with his life in retirement, sees the interviews as way to recapture public support. Frost wants to delve into the Watergate Hotel break-in, an action that found members of Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President, break into the suite rented by the Democratic National Committee to capture documents that might prove damaging to George McGovern, the Democratic nominee who opposed Nixon. Frost wants to prove that not only did the President authorize the criminal act: he scraped up hush money to keep the burglars quiet.
The first three 90-minute interviews fail to deliver anything dramatic. The fourth and final round draws a knockout punch, though in the interest of keeping the climactic moments a surprise, the audience will have to see the movie rather than getting that information from reviews. While the recorded banter between the two fighters is probably taken right from the transcripts of the TV programs, one terrific scene which is likely to be fictional finds an inebriated Nixon calling Frost in the middle of the night complaining that no matter how high some of us get in our professional lives, we will always be looked down upon by the elite—in Nixon's case, presumably, the East and West Coast liberals such as university professors, and the upper one percent of the population allegedly courted by President Bush.
In a far more dramatic way than Sarah Palin's disastrous interviews with Katie Couric in which the former could not name a single magazine that she read, Nixon is K.O.'d by his own self-loathing, a hatred that has seen him refusing to burn tapes incriminating him in knowing about and trying in a criminal way to cover-up the Watergate Hotel break-in. Once again, a terrific piece of work.
Rated R. 122 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
