Frost/Nixon, l'heure de vérité

The sole reason I did not watch this in the cinema two years ago was that I could not find a theater near me that played it, and I was, as I am now, a busy student. That caused me to have to take breaks in my viewing of it, and I have to say, it was not easy to do so. It is, simply put, immensely gripping, and the ending is pitch perfect. I haven't seen the play, but I understand that this expands upon the people around the two who were engaged in the verbal boxing match, especially Cushing. The two leads are the same, and I can get behind getting them to do both versions. They are immensely talented(they had the material so committed to memory that they only flubbed once each), and Sheen is an absolute chameleon, disappearing entirely into what he portrays(I can just barely believe that he played Lucian in the Underworld trilogy... great job in those, by the way). The cast is fantastic, and everyone really delves into their credible and swiftly developed characters. This manages to not paint anyone as a one-note good or bad guy, and I have to admit, I did not feel any sympathy for the former president before this film. The acting is amazing. Dialog is excellent. A little of it was improvised; so was most of the camera-work, and it helps make it feel dynamic and natural. This builds tension rather well. The drama is compelling. There is a short sequence of disturbing content, infrequent strong language and brief nudity in this. The DVD comes with an informational commentary track by Howard, a well-done 23 minute behind-the-scenes production, 22 and a half minutes of deleted scenes, and two well-made featurettes of 7 and a half minutes(about the real interview) and six minutes(about the Nixon library), respectively. I recommend this to anyone interested in the subject. 8/10

I had the pleasure of watching this gripping movie at the opening night of the British Film festival. Ron Howard's direction and story telling ability are in top form with this effort. From the very first scene a carefully crafted and very credible 70s's atmosphere sets a solid stage for the superbly cast film and quickly transports the viewer into the political jungle that was "Tricky Dickey's" playground.

The acting duo of Frank Langella & Micheal Sheen (Nixon & Frost) are set on a collision course that finds two deeply passionate personalities at the mercy of their insatiable desires. Both actor's portrayals are a study of affectation and body language, pleasurably accurate and yet not simply an impersonation. Indeed, the film never strays from the distinct Howard format that breathes so much life (read intimacy) into this familiar and yet mysterious relationship that exists for so many people who lived through the exceptional event.

Make no mistake, this is by no means a two man show, quite the contrary. In fact, the wealth of supporting roles is perhaps the finest feature of this production. Bacon's devoted and stalwart marine practically glints of gun metal and polished shoe leather. The trio of Gould, Platt and Rockwell portray effortlessly the roles of the men who, brick by brick, constructed the platform from which Frost so successfully and serendipitously elicited one of the greatest unspoken confessions of all time. Rebecca Hall is delicious and demure, constantly filling scenes with her elegant presence.

Perhaps the richest praise should be reserved for Peter Morgan, who has, without question, penned a truly captivating and insightful story that delivers not only a satisfying comprehension of a complex time in US history, but captures a generation's struggle to come to terms with the frailty of leadership that still echoes today.

Not to be missed, this film can be enjoyed on multiple levels and will undoubtedly be regarded as seminal for it's engrossing insight and expert depiction.

It didn't seem so in the run-up to the event, but British talk show host/interviewer David Frost's 1977 series of four on screen encounters with the disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon was great, historic television. This movie directed by Ron Howard successfully transfers the Peter Morgan play about the event to the big screen. Arguably, the story belonged here all along. The paraphernalia of a Hollywood production enables Howard to gussy up this claustrophobic event with such acoutrements as the luxury suite of a 747, Nixon's "smart" seaside villa La Casa Pacifica at San Clemente, and the impressive, downright menacing sight of a presidential motorcade. As the train of glittering, dark limos approach the Nixon friend's house where the interviews were shot it feels like a battalion of tanks; and Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), the British socialite Frost chats up on the plane and makes his consort for the duration of the exploit seems the more slinky and glamorous for emerging from a posh airplane rather than a bare stage. Lighting tricks and artful camera angles help make Frank Langella morph more successfully into Nixon than his physicality would otherwise permit. Michael Sheen as Frost already seems to look and sound like his character, and the "monkey suit" blue blazer outfits add the final touch. His task is easier; we don't know so well or care so much what Frost was like. In the film version, both performances take on more nuance. Langella's performance on camera brims of with dyspeptic melancholy, aggression, and self-pity; Michael Sheen's as frost glitters with a muted, hysterical cheer mixing infantilism and fear. The extra visuals of a film also help to show Nixon's comfort and loneliness and Frost's sleazy playboy side.

It's important that the fakery should work well, because the movie must provide lots of closeups that those in the balcony didn't see. So long as it works, the feeling of TV interviews is better achieved in the film, and the actors don't have to yell. The camera, sometimes annoyingly jerky, but in the best moments simply direct and relentless, does their yelling for them.

So I'm saying this is a winner. Peter Morgan after all did the screenplay, and he's no stranger to such efforts--notable examples of his film writing are in The Last King of Scotland and The Queen; a rather less notable one is The Other Boleyn Girl. The flaws are simply in the events. For three of the interview parts, till it gets to Watergate in the fourth, Nixon seems to be winning. Despite a dramatic intervention by Nixon support staffer Col Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) to prevent an abject breakdown, Nixon does buckle under in part four. But his admissions still remain in the realm of generality, and there is the question: does anything said on TV really matter? The audience for a West End or Broadway play is a bit different from the popcorn crowd and how appealing this film will be to the mainstream is uncertain. Needless to say it's all talk and minimal action. For students of contemporary American history nonetheless the topic is thrilling. Frost used his own money for down payments. In need of cash and highly mercenary, Nixon used the celebrity agent Swiftie Lazar (Toby Jones) to get $600,000 for the interviews. Frost lost sponsors and the US networks refused to come aboard. He made down payments from his own funds and borrowed. He hired two journalists, Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston (Sam Rockwell), to do support research. Reston was a firebrand opponent of Nixon. He refused to participate unless there was a commitment to shame Nixon and get him to admit he did wrong in Watergate and betrayed the country's trust.

The issue was whether Frost had the depth to tackle a job like this. He wanted a Watergate confession too, but he let Nicon play him with small talk (despite the man's claim that he was no good at it) and temporize with lengthy self-serving reminiscences that blunted most of Frost's pointed questions. This is where Zelick and especially Reston come in to give a sense of urgency. Again the film excels where the play couldn't in showing Nixon's walk out to his car after each encounter, jubilant at first, pathetic at the end.

Ultimately both in the play and the film, Frost's victory seems a hollow one, of little significance to morality or history. This is above all a story about television. In that arena, this was a coup. and there is great drama in how close Frost's project came to failing. As the encounters got under way, he was losing every sponsor, and later he lost his Australian show, having some time earlier lost his American one. The film tells us they all came back, and then some. Frost never really seems to have reentered the world of American television, but he has had many projects in England and is said now to be "worth £20 million," with a live weekly current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. Nixon is dead, and though he may have won three rounds out of four in the Frost interviews, his legacy is tainted.

The show belongs to Sheen and Langella, but Bacon is excellent as the stiff, loyal Col. Brennan, and Sam Rockwell strong in an unusually serious role for him. As Nixon's somewhat lost wife Pat, the child star of The Bad Seed Patty McCormack is touching. There are lots of other actors, far more than in the stage production, and the best thing is they don't get in the way. San Clemente also plays a significant role. The brightness and beauty of Nixon's ocean-side estate helps dramatize his depression by contrast. There were doubts about putting Howard in charge of the screen version, but they were groundless.

The Frost/Nixon interviews are fascinating. Not every second of them, especially not when Nixon rambles on and on, avoiding questions by offering anecdotes in place of answers. Yet, they are an invaluable historical document, which allow us the rare privilege of seeing a major politician as a human being and nothing else. As interesting as the interviews themselves is the lead-up to them, the circumstances surrounding them, and the characters involved, particularly Frost and Nixon, of course. One could say that you only need to watch the actual footage, but there's ample room for a great dramatization, but it needed an even-handed approach, and certainly needed no political preaching.

I have a personal dislike for Ron Howard as a director, a result of my sensibilities mainly, I suspect. Howard strikes me as a particularly heavy-handed, didactic director who has wasted many great concepts on mediocre films (out of 18 films I've seen by him, I only genuinely liked "Apollo 13". I was expecting the worst with "Frost/Nixon", but instead was met with one of the most entertaining films in a while, and a remarkably well-acted, even-handed, quality character study. I suppose I should have been prepared for a quality screenplay given the success of this Peter Morgan play in New York and London, but I was hardly expecting something this good. It's glib, funny, well-paced, expertly-structured, clever, observant, and intelligent. It creates a fascinating Nixon, played brilliantly by the great Frank Langella, though this is not quite up there with the likes of Oliver Stone's sadly under-appreciated "Nixon" or Robert Altman's endlessly fascinating "Secret Honor". The film is almost surprisingly well-directed, although there is a bit of the old TV trick of shaking the camera a bit, panning too often, to give the illusion of motion and energy when there's really just people in a room talking. The conversation's interesting enough, there's no need for that. Oh well, I suppose I am nitpicking.

As far as Nixon movies go this is lightweight entertainment with plenty of comic moments largely leading up to two or three scenes of real human vulnerability. Aside from these scenes (which are truly, truly excellent), Peter Morgan conceives the meeting as something of a chess match with the unpredictability of a boxing match. To use J. Hoberman's words 'a prize fight between two comeback-hungry veterans, only one of whom could win'. On paper this could have been very heavy on amateur psychoanalysis and low on entertainment value but Morgan and I suppose Howard as well are clever enough to have some fun with the idea. This is not a criticism at all, the film has moments of surprisingly real depth and intellectualism, but overall the nature of the script works in its favor, makes those scenes more interesting, more ultimately rewarding.

"Frost/Nixon" is an entertaining, exciting film, around as populist as I expected but in a very different way. This is the sort of writing we don't see enough of, particularly not in today's films. It's vaguely reminiscent of a particularly good BBC television drama. The cast is certainly good enough for that. Langella and Michael Sheen are outstanding, both manage to accurately portray the real-life men they are portraying while still adding some characterization and mannerisms of their own. Langella's Tony-award winning performance might be up for Oscar consideration soon, but Sheen's Frost almost upstages him at times. No heavy-handedness, no political 'messages', just a fun, clever script and a great cast in a well-made film.

Ron Howard's competent film adaptation of Peter Morgan's play (who also scripted and co-produced here) dramatizes the famous Frost/Nixon interviews from 1977. At one point in the film, Kevin Bacon's character explains to Frank Langella's Nixon that a portion of the interview will focus on "Nixon the man". To which Nixon retorted, "As opposed to what? Nixon the horse?" Of course what was on everyone's mind at the time was Watergate and how American was never able to give Nixon the trial they so desperately wanted. Through the unlikely Frost interviews, the American people finally heard the truth behind the scandal--straight from the horse's mouth.

Morgan's source material translates smoothly onto film. Much as he did with "The Queen", he mixes a behind the scenes look at the immediate time period leading up to the historical event and closes with an almost word-for-word dramatization of said event. Also, like "The Queen", we have the excellent Michael Sheen on board, who after playing Tony Blair now takes on the mannerisms of the legendary British talk-show host and man-about-town David Frost. Director Ron Howard nicely interweaves archival news footage, faux-post interviews with the secondary players, and the dramatic reenactments of the actual Frost/Nixon interviews. Howard's studied but pedestrian style of direction lends itself well to this type of docudrama as he allows the actual events to speak for themselves and the fine performances to shine on their own. Though it takes quite awhile to get where it's going, the final interview where Frost takes Nixon head-on about the Watergate cover-up is a payoff well worth the wait.

Of course the most fascinating aspect of the film is Frank Langella's portrayal of a shamed and swollen Richard Nixon. He plays him as a fallen man desperate for an act of contrition but still in too deep with his old trickery and slick ways. His performance, and the way it connects with the audience, is wonderfully layered. On one level, we have an aged actor thought to be well past his prime firing back on all cylinders in a renaissance role that will likely lead to a showering of award nominations. The way the film reduces his performance to that one lingering close-up after being steamrolled by Frost on the last day of the interview leaves a lasting impression. But it also works on another level as it is meant to represent the reduction of Nixon's political life to that one lingering close-up on the television monitor when he realized it's all over for him. The audience members who remember watching the interviews and can picture the actual close-up they saw on their TV screens are now allowed to share a communion with the audience members who weren't even born yet and now only have a memory of Langella's face on the silver screen. In that sense, Langella truly became Nixon, and his performance will not soon be forgotten.