Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon (***1/2)

"So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal."

"Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

That exchange was one of the most significant moments from the real life Frost-Nixon interviews, and its one of the most significant moments in the movie Frost/Nixon as well. As I recall, its even how they ended the trailer for it. Yet, when you look at today's politics, you see that its considered a perfectly reasonable opinion that no investigations should be done of the use of torture during the Bush administration because we were in a post-9/11 world and the President was only trying to keep us safe. Sure, the Bush administration probably broke the law, but they did it for the very best of reasons. As shocking as it still sounds when its said as overtly as Nixon said it, it seems as though we've forgotten why that was such an outrageous thing for an American President to say in the first place. But, this isn't a political blog, and I digress.

Frost/Nixon was released last year and was one of the five nominated films for Best Picture at the last Oscars. It didn't win and I don't think it got robbed although it does have a lot going for it, first and foremost being the performance of Frank Langella as Nixon (he got an Oscar nod as well). It was directed by Ron Howard, who also directed the last movie I reviewed, Angels and Demons, although this fact probably wouldn't ever occur to you if you didn't read the credits of each one. Whereas Angels had all the hallmarks of a Hollywood summer blockbuster, Howard doesn't let Frost/Nixon stray too far away from its origins as a Broadway play. As they did in the play, Michael Sheen and the aforementioned Langella play the title roles of David Frost and Richard Nixon, and the movie remains narrowly focused on its few principal characters as a play would. Peter Morgan, who wrote the play, also wrote the screenplay, giving the movie something in common with another great adaptation from a play, Doubt. Here, Ron Howard directs his movie as sort of a combination of a stage production and a faux-documentary, as we'll see a scene or two and then see a clip of an ancillary character speaking directly into the camera, as if the person they were playing was giving an interview after the fact.

The movie is pretty much entirely structured around the Frost/Nixon interviews themselves. In the first act, we learn how they came to be and what everyone's motivations were for being involved with them going in. Frost--a British TV personality who was popular, wealthy, and on the "it list" socially, but a bit frustrated with how vapid some of his programming had become--gets a sudden inspiration to do the interview when watching coverage of Nixon's resignation and his subsequent farewell boarding the plane that's going to take him away to Califronia. Nixon is persuaded to do it by his aides which have remained by his side, who see Frost as a pushover, thus making it an execllent opportunity for Nixon to rebuild his character while making a ton of money in the process. Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) are journalists, scholars, and generally despise all things Nixon. They're chosen to be "cornermen" for Frost and his producers during the interview, and they want the interviews to serve as "the trial that Nixon never had." The second act is the preparation for the interviews, as Frost tries to strike a balance between doing the meticulous research that Zelnick and Reston demand, while trying to fly around the world putting a smile on his face for potential advertisers as he tries to cover the tremendous cost of making the interview happen. Meanwhile, Nixon and his camp are doing preparation of their own, but also wringing their hands at how much of a cakewalk its seemingly going to be. Finally, the last act of the movie is the interviews themselves, which Nixon initially dominates, playing psychological mindgames with Frost, to great effect, and pretty much controlling the pace and tone of the entire conversations. As time goes on, Frost, of course, overcomes this, leading up to the big "gotcha" moments like the one at the beginning of this post.

Before seeing the movie, I kept seeing interviews with Ron Howard describing how much he wanted to make a Frost/Nixon movie because of how enamored he was with the play, and especially the "boxing match" like quality that the entire story had, with each of the four interview tapings being like individual rounds in a match. In some ways, this is absolutely true. In the run-up to the interviews, we get montages of Frost, his lead producer, and his cornermen hunched over books late at night in the same way we see Rocky running up steps in a sweatjacket and punching pieces of meat to the tunes of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Push it to the Limit" in that franchise. And in between "rounds," we get Zelnick and Reston explaining to Frost everything he screwed up and everything he let Nixon get a way with, akin to an old crumungeoney boxing corner man slapping his fighter across the face and yelling stuff like "He's murderin' ya out there! You gotta want it!" But personally, as much as it may have been Howard's inspiration for making the movie, I didn't find this dynamic to be the most interesting part of it. As much as the trailers and Howard's descriptions seem to suggest otherwise, the actual interview tapings don't really have a whole lot of total screen time. Up until the final taping, where all of the Watergate details are addressed, we really only see the questions and answers from a couple of topics, and really only see enough of them to establish Nixon's tenacity and ruthlessness in a debate. Really the whole reason why the interviews eventually turn around for Frost and his corner (at least within world of the movie, perhaps not in real life), is because of an idea Reston mentions early on and which is ignored until the run-up to the final taping. That this was going to be the "eureka" moment of the whole plot seemed fairly obvious to me when its first brought up, and the tension of how Frost & co. are going to "get" Nixon in the end never really comes to much of a crescendo.

Of much more interest to me than the tit-for-tat of the interviews was how the movie portrayed Nixon as a man, and how Frank Langella portrays him. On one level, we see a man who is as ruthless and conniving enough to concieve of a scheme like Watergate and still want to get back into the political arena after getting thrown out of office for it. In some ways, Nixon seems destined to keep fighting the accusations against him because that's really all he knows how to do. On the morning of one of the tapings, we see Nixon looking out his window and jogging in place, "getting his game face on" if you will. This is who he is and what he does. On another level though, we see Nixon as a man being eaten away by guilt as well as some weird, deep-rooted inferiority complex. The night before the final taping, Nixon basically drunk dials Frost's hotel room, and once Frost answers he puts his phone on speaker, starts walking around his darkened living room and starts talking about how even being President isn't enough for all the stuck up Ivy league kids he went to school with. As much as Nixon has honed his skills in debate and political damage control, in some sense, Nixon has already lost his battle with Frost before it begins because of how broken a man he's become since being stripped of power.

Langella does an excellent job of highlighting the complexities of Nixon as a character, and even manages to make him maybe a tiny bit sympathetic. He plays him accurately enough for an audience to believe that its him, but doesn't ham up his impression of him to the point of parody. Martin Sheen is very good as Frost as well, but as I described above, his part of the story as the David going up against Goliath, is kind of predictable and just doesn't seem to have as much going on as Nixon's inner turmoil. Frost gets a love interest early on in the movie in the form of Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), but she doesn't really seem to have much to do except to be there when Frost meets Nixon so Nixon can make snide, creepy comments about her. Without Frank Langella I don't know how good this movie would be, but with him its very good, if perhaps not one of the very best of 2008.