Friday, December 12, 2008

Movie review: Frost/Nixon

By John P. Meyer

Ron Howard's gripping film version of the Peter Morgan stage play, Frost/Nixon, starts by immersing us in the life and times of Richard Nixon's fall from presidential grace. It accomplishes this through the agency of file footage and TV news anchor monologues (Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, etc.). This at first smacks of the setup for a Saturday Night Live-type parody, particularly after we get to the iconic sequence of Nixon entering the helicopter to leave the White House for the last time - smiling duplicitously and flashing victory signs to the assembled press corps - and find that Frank Langella is standing in for the real Tricky Dick.

For the next ten or fifteen minutes, indeed, we find ourselves preoccupied with comparing Langella's portrayal of Nixon with our memories of the man himself. Once this distraction is put behind us, however - as it is, once we realize that the actor's intent is to capture the personality of Nixon, rather than attempting a detailed physical caricature - we can begin to appreciate the extent of Langella's accomplishment. Go ahead and assume he will receive a Best Actor nod on Jan. 22. (He's already received a Golden Globe nomination for the role.)

This tight-knit tale of psychological cat-and-mouse and verbal one-upmanship is an actor's dream project. Joining in on the fun are Kevin Bacon (as Nixon aide Jack Brennan); Sam Rockwell (as writer/political observer James Reston, Jr.); Matthew Macfadyen (as BBC producer John Birt); Oliver Platt (as journalist/editor Bob Zelnick); Rebecca Hall (as Frost's celebrity-smitten, arm-candy girlfriend Caroline Cushing); Toby Jones (as cutthroat p.r. guy Swifty Lazar) and - of course - Michael Sheen as David Frost.

"Sir... your barn door is open."

Sheen's performance is likewise outstanding. He portrays Frost as a vacuously-grinning, deer-in-the-headlights drifter on the white water of history for most of the marathon Nixon interview sessions. The movie's central premise holds that, while Frost had the acumen to orchestrate the videotaped interviews, his ability to pin the slippery ex-pres to the mea culpa canvas of personal responsibility was highly questionable.

As one topical segment of the pre-arranged tete-a-tete format follows after another - and Frost the interviewer is reduced to Frost the Nixon straight man - even Frost's own team starts to doubt whether their guy can pull off the cathartic, guilt-ridden unburdening by the defrocked head of state that they had all set out to accomplish. Even Frost himself begins to despair, and it's only through the agency of a late-night phone call from a very unexpected source that his resolve is reaffirmed.

"Mr. Frost, I'd just like to state for the record - you have the most beautiful blue eyes."

Much of the setup leading to the actual interviews concerns how the taping sessions were agreed upon and the motivations of the opposing (even "combatant") parties. One might wonder why Nixon even considered agreeing to the deal: what was in it for him? If he somehow tripped up and spilled his guts (as bloody unlikely as that prospect might have been), he had much to lose. But on the flip side, he was being paid rather handsomely for merely sitting down and chatting with a veritable media nonentity, and the possibility existed that he could actually engineer a re-emergence onto the world stage via the launching platform of the broadcasts. (Nixon's prior engagement, before being contacted by the Frost contingent, was a speech before the Orthodontic Society of Houston - who proved to be a pretty tough crowd when it came to subtle political witticism.)

"Pull my finger. I dare ya."

The danger for Frost and his backers becomes clear when the tentative sponsorship deals he'd lined up begin to fall apart like a house of cards, leaving him without the financial resources he was counting on to pay Nixon and promote the broadcast. Frost had arranged the whole thing on spec and was betting that a network would pick up the program, given its relevance and potentially historic importance. When he discovers that no one in the TV establishment cares about what he and Nixon might have to say to each other (it's all Watergate under the bridge at that point, seems to be the consensus), he begins to wonder whether the completed interview segments will ever be seen by anyone outside his own screening room.

For those of us who were around while this whole thing was happening, Frost/Nixon serves up a pitch-perfect reminder of the way things were. For the less-seasoned in the audience, a more likely thought process might center on speculation as to what might happen if a certain soon-to-be ex-president were to sit down across a microphone with someone like - say - Jon Stewart.

Related stories

• Gay List Daily’s must-do events: Feb. 19-22, 2009 (Feb. 19, 2009)
• Video: Pegnews film guys in Oscar preview mode (Feb. 18, 2009)
• Movie review: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (Jan. 23, 2009)
• North Texas Film Critics Association names best of 2008 (Jan. 12, 2009)

See more stories in:

• Arts > Movies / Film > Mainstream Movies