January 1, 2009: Frost/Nixon
Now, here we have a nice contrast to my earlier review of Milk, the film about the late San Francisco city councillor Harvey Milk. Frost/Nixon is a story about two people, but it doesn’t purport to be about their lives. It is about a specific event in their lives, and that’s the major difference between this and a typical biopic. In 1977, British TV host David Frost went through a cathartic series of televised interviews with former US President Richard Nixon, and the scale of this event is suitable for boiling down to a single feature.
Adapted from a 2006 stage play starring Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, the two actors come to us now on screen reprising their roles under the direction of Oscar-winner Ron Howard (Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, also known for Apollo 13, Cocoon and Splash). A significant Oscar contender this year, it is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Frank Langella) and Best Director, as well as for its adapted screenplay and editing.
I must admit I wasn’t familiar with this TV event of the late 1970s, having been far too young at the time to know what was going on, and I suppose not being heavy into political history. I found the film to be an educational look at the event, providing some background into how it came about and who was involved, and it inspired me to look into this deeper, including looking at part of a documentary program in which David Frost talks about the interviews decades later and excerpts heavily from the original TV programs. Frost/Nixon is most definitely a movie, with all the usual character and dramatic constructs, but one with some depth behind it.
As with a previous Ron Howard true story adapted for the silver screen, Apollo 13, again we know where it’s going and that means what’s most important is that we’re OK with the ride. I’ve contradicted my claim in the previous paragraph that I am unfamiliar with the events, but I’m referring here both to people who lived through that time as well as to folks like myself who gathered enough from descriptions of the movie to already gather roughly what happened in the end. Nixon had refused to revisit the Watergate scandal in public since his resignation in 1974, but at the urging of his handlers and believing that he would be battling a lightweight opponent, he agreed to the interviews, only to be pushed in the end towards more or less admitting his mistakes in the scandal. There was a good deal of tension in the interviews themselves and among the players offstage, but ultimately it seems that both men got something positive out of the experience – increased fame and credibility for Frost, and the chance for Nixon to tell his story in his own words and stress some key disagreements he had with how he his decisions had been characterized.
The film itself exhibits great pacing in its final third, but I found it a bit slow and unsatisfying for the first half. Ron Howard as a director is despised by many due to his mile-wide sentimental streak and “nice-ifying” techniques, but it was widely agreed that those tendencies helped this movie to succeed and to become more accessible, rather than limiting it.
I’m not sure I could heartily recommend this film over viewing the actual interviews (which are quite compelling from the parts I’ve seen) and reading more about the background, so in that way, it falls a bit into my general feelings about biopic attempts. But by addressing only this focused event rather than someone’s entire life, greater depth is achieved and we’ve got a worthwhile movie. Best Picture? I don’t think so. But the acting and writing are real contenders.
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