Frost/Nixon is a full on respectable, accomplished and intelligent retelling of the now famous series of interviews English television personality David Frost conducted with disgraced former President Nixon in 1977, just a few years after Nixon’s resignation. No one can argue a successful stageplay hasn’t been transformed into a beautifully shot narrative with two memorable performances by Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. The film holds your attention and reeks of competence from beginning to end.
All that’s missing is a point.
Since 1976’s All The President’s Men Nixon’s become a genre all his own. Take a look. So what exactly is the point of yet another Nixon Was An Evil Weird Cheap Racist picture? What our thirty-seventh president really needs is an artist with the artistry to Downfall the man. After all, you don’t win two presidential elections and force John F. Kennedy to steal his if all you are is a stooped-over gargoyle crippled with paranoia. Unfortunately, there’s nothing over Frost/Nixon’s 122 minute runtime that adds a thing to the bloated Nixon Genre.
Not that the story isn’t an interesting and sometimes fascinating one. Director Ron Howard, working from Peter Morgan’s, script based on his own play, sets the confrontation up as a boxing match between a wily champ whose experience has taught him all the tricks and a brash young contender who has no idea what a punch from the real deal feels like.
Still shy of forty, Frost lives an Austin Powerish life jetting off to do his various and silly television shows, partying with celebrities, and shagging stewardesses in the good old days before they became flight attendants. But his career is also on the wane and in the elusive and darkly fascinating Nixon, Frost sees not only a shot at big ratings but a return to where success in the entertainment business really means something: Hollywood.
For his part, Nixon wants his reputation back, wants to make his case and remind the American people that he was more than just the “victim” of a two-bit burglary. In David Frost, Nixon, for good reasons, sees easy pickings; an unserious goofball with no idea what he’s up against offering a ton of money and hours of television.
The interviews are filmed in two hour segments over a series of days. In keeping with the boxing metaphor, Howard presents them as rounds with Frost getting his clock cleaned in most of the early ones. In his corner are two very unhappy men, Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), a former network guy, and James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), a Nixon-loathing researcher. Both are badly in need of a “win” if they’re to avoid professional humiliation.
A “win” is defined as “getting” Nixon. In their opinion, Ford’s pardon was not the end of a long national nightmare, but instead getnix-interruptus. They don’t want to understand their subject and they don’t want others to understand him, either. They want his head on a pole and all the career benefits that will come with that victory.
Besides being a pointless exercise in baby boomer narcissism, the narrative has its share of problems. Throughout the film a number of the characters pop up in interview segments to move and explain the plot. Maybe the idea is in keeping with the boxing metaphor with between-round analysis, but characters looking into a camera in order to explain what we just watched and their own motivations in anything other than a documentary is as artificial as you can get.
Early in the film Frost picks up and enters into a relationship with a young woman (Caroline Cushing) he meets on a flight to Los Angeles where he’s to meet Nixon for the first time. Other than her being an exposition excuse for Frost to pour out his anxieties, the relationship adds nothing, either to the plot or in examining the Frost character. The producers might have saved Cushing’s salary by simply having Frost speak into the camera like everyone else.
The politics of the film are decidedly left wing and the whole exercise reeks of liberal wish fulfillment. For much of the film Frost is unable to “get” Nixon and this is only presented as a lack of seriousness and preparation on his part, as opposed to a lack of argument. This is most apparent during the “round” involving Vietnam.
Nixon inherited a messy war started by JFK and bungled by Lyndon Johnson. You may not want to go as far as calling it a victory, but Nixon did manage to do in Vietnam better than we did in Korea. His relentless bombing campaign, including Cambodia, brought peace between the North and South, and more importantly, a removal of most of our military personnel.
Hollywood (and the liberal media) take great pains to avoid this chapter of our history and Frost/Nixon is no different. The fall of Saigon and the Holocaust in Cambodia wouldn’t have happened had the Democrats not won control of Congress in 1974 pledging to pull financial support from our allies in South Vietnam. Emboldened by the American Left, the North invaded and 3 million innocent people were murdered and/or “re-educated.”
These are facts, but the film will have none of it and the Nixon character’s protestations to the contrary, those who aren’t aware of them will be left with the impression that there never was a peace agreement, our troops never were removed, and the Holocaust in Cambodia was not a direct result of the Left abandoning our allies — but rather the bombing of Cambodia, the very act which brought about peace in the first place.
The film’s biggest flaw, however, is a deus ex machina involving Sam Rockwell’s character telegraphed so obviously and early it takes all the juice out of the story before it really begins. As Howard proved with the marvelous Apollo 13 he’s more than able to tell a suspenseful story even though how it ends is already well known. The fun is watching how success is achieved and Nixon/Frost practically puts this up in neon deflating its own purpose.
Frost/Nixon rates as an impressive television movie, but as a feature it lacks a point, any kind of real intellectual curiosity, and, most of all, an ambition to do more than win awards. There’s a great Nixon film to be made about this corrupt but fascinating man, but a couple of terrific lead performances won’t help anyone remember this one for very long.
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