One thing that can be said about Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon is that, unlike many movies based on plays, his doesn’t feel like a staged recreation. You never get the sense that you’re watching people shuffle about, preening for the audience; he’s managed to create a living, breathing movie, which is just what a man of his talent should be able to do. Too bad that’s about all he does.
In 1977, British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) found his career halting, his star fading; he was all but exiled to Australia, his shows in both America and England having been canceled. Frost sees Richard Nixon’s (Frank Langella) resignation live on TV, and wonders why Nixon didn’t wait to do it until later in the day: “It’s 6 AM over there; half his audience is asleep.” He immediately asks one of his people to get the numbers for the broadcast. Of course, viewership had been enormous, and Frost decides right then and there that he’ll interview Nixon and recapture his success.
Nixon’s people, including military aide Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), are surprisingly open to the idea. They view it as a softball alternative to an interview with an actual journalist like Mike Wallace. So once Frost has (most of) the money and is able to bypass the networks, who are completely uninterested in a puff piece on the most reviled president in recent memory, Nixon agrees to four days of interviews, each about a different aspect of his presidency, with little focus on Watergate.
Or so he thinks. Frost hires a team of investigators, consisting of his producer John Birt (Matthew Macfayden), author James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell), and TV newsman Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt). They’re not interested in treating Nixon with kid gloves. They want to give him the trial he never had, the closure America longs for, as the film’s trailers keep saying.
And so they do. But it takes them a while, and they’re all on hand to tell us exactly what they were feeling, what they were going to do, when they were going to do it, etc. For you see, the script by Peter Morgan, who wrote the original stage play, uses as a framing device brief interview snippets in which all of the major characters (sans Nixon and Frost) give us their take on the events that are about to happen or that have just happened. I can see how, when you’re sitting around with a bunch of your buddies, it sounds really clever and profound to intersperse a movie about an interview with a bunch of other interviews. The reality, though, is that it’s a lazy gimmick which excuses Morgan and Howard from ever having to show us who their characters are and what they feel. They can just tell us to death.
Article comments
1 - handyguy
I was always very aware that I was watching actors portray famous people, and especially in the case of Langella's Nixon, this repeatedly jolted me out of the movie.
On stage, the fact that actors don't look much like the famous people they are playing may not matter as much. In the movie, it's almost a deal killer.
Nevertheless, it's pretty entertaining.