RasoirJ on Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon (2008) ****
For me there’s a persistent problem with biopics – at least film biographies of well-known figures from the age of television. I keep thinking: “You’re not JFK, Malcolm X, LBJ, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, or Diana Ross.” With the real thing so fresh, it’s hard to make the required leap of a faith into the movie’s reality. I begin to wonder how much is taken from actuality and how much depends on the demands of story-telling.

Director Ron Howard, working from a cleverly adapted stage play by Peter Morgan, clears this belief hurdle simply by casting Frank Langella as Nixon. Langella, a vet actor at the top of his game, makes his Nixon far more compelling – that is, watchable and, dare I say, charismatic than the original. The film is best seen, then, not as history or the truth about Tricky Dick, but as rip-roaring entertainment. It has the elements of good stage drama – two worthy antagonists, each a giant in his realm and each ruthless, fighting for a grand prize, their reputations in history. At their first meeting Langella/Nixon says to Frost, “So, Mr. Frost, you’ve challenged me to a duel.” Exactly.

Michael Sheen, solid as Tony Blair in The Queen, has a less showy part here as the TV genius/huckster Frost, but he handles it well. The battle is framed in the minds of each man’s aides, who see the interviews as the public trial Nixon never got after he was pardoned. At times the film plays as an insider’s guide on how talking points get prepared.

But in end this is Langella’s movie. His Nixon has a self-ironic, disarming reflectiveness, and Langella, amazingly, makes the crafty old devil likable. The climax, 10 seconds screen time where he gets nailed with an unanticipated question and acts only with his face in close-up, is a great screen moment. There is a sense, perhaps unanticipated by the filmmakers, in which the movie rehabs Nixon. It makes me want to dig out those old Frost interview tapes. Could I have been wrong all these years about the old boy?