Richard Nixon, Pound-for-Pound
“No holds barred” is how ex-President Richard M. Nixon approached his interviews with David Frost, that is, according to FROST/NIXON, Ron Howard’s new film about the 1977 landmark TV events. And we do get a series of unbridled interview sessions between young TV host and grizzled embittered ex-world leader, going toe-to-toe in increasingly tense sessions. Based on Peter Morgan’s play, which he adapted for this film, FROST/NIXON posits a Richard Nixon we may have never seen before but for those memorable interviews over 30 years ago.
In what might have at first seemed like miscasting, Frank Langella makes for a more than adequate screen Nixon, even when compared to the stellar job that Anthony Hopkins did in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic, NIXON. Langella fully inhabits the man who was mocked as Trickie Dickie during his presidency for his maneuverability around controversial subjects. As his foil, Michael Sheen, who perfectly portrayed Tony Blair in THE QUEEN, creates a fully believable David Frost, a playboy TV personality who on a whim decides to produce his own new breed of interview show with Nixon as his initial key subject.
Certainly, there is due drama in both the behind-the-scenes aspects of setting up the interviews and in their ascending narrative tension as Frost begins to sense that he is much overmatched, almost until it is too late to resurrect his chance to give Nixon “the trial that he never had.”
One of the key drawbacks in the film, which may not have been as crucial in the play (which likely targeted an informed intelligensia), is in the presumption that the audience knows the particulars of Nixon’s politics, especially the vital facts and personalities involved with the Watergate scandal which led to Nixon’s 1974 resignation. But even for those in the know, these events of over a quarter-century ago are hardly fresh. In several key research sequences, we instead get a montage and once-over-lightly treatment of those places, dates, and names, so that when we arrive at the last interview, with Blair fully versed in the topic of Watergate, the audience is left to assume that Blair’s notes are on target, as opposed to actually knowing the facts themselves. In contrast to, say, the forensic details of Oliver Stone’s films such as JFK and NIXON, here we are left with scant information and much left to the imagination. An additional sequence or series of graphics with a detailed analysis of Watergate particulars would have solved this problem.
What remains is watching Nixon at first get the better of Frost until Frost musters the guts and courage to pick Nixon’s story apart beat-by-beat in the climactic moments. Certainly, these final scenes make the entirety worthwhile, and much drama ensues around the pseudo-confession of a man who never seemed to really understand the breadth of his “mistakes” as a leader, statesman, and once politically trusted figure. The film never mentions, for instance, that under five months after the Watergate break-in, Nixon won the 1972 Presidential election in a certain landslide.
Aside from the final title fight between Nixon and Frost, the film’s best moments are outside of the actual interview sessions. In what might be somewhat of a fantasy sequence, Nixon calls Frost late at night at the latter’s hotel, a conversation Nixon later says that he did not remember. Nixon’s rant during the call, during which he goes into a tirade against more privileged people with whom he has had to compete through his life, makes for the most interesting cinema in the film, much like Nixon the president’s late-night foray to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to meet with protestors in Oliver Stone’s NIXON.
Like other plays turned into movies, FROST/NIXON suffers from the staginess and confinement of its story to one main setting for the better part of the movie. Unlike, say, A FEW GOOD MEN, which easily translated to film, this subject matter fails to “open up” much beyond being a filmed play for its most important scenes. Thus, with other narrative faults intact, while the film is well made and performed, this time, it might have been best left for the stage.
