Frost/Nixon
Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Peter Morgan
Starring Frank Langella
and Michael Sheen
Classification: PG
***
Really, only a single Brit had the credentials to dissect the riven heart, and the worrisome legacy, of Richard Nixon. But since Shakespeare wasn't available, denying us what might have been his greatest history play, the world made do with David Frost. And so, on a televised set back in 1977, a series of interviews pitted the arch political villain of the time against a British chat-show host with a reputation as lightweight as his blow-dried do. It seemed, before the bell rang for the first round, like a recipe for turning tragedy into farce - like watching Richard III getting grilled by Feste the clown.
Such is the starting point of Frost/Nixon, an engaging period piece adapted by Peter Morgan from his own stage play and directed by Ron Howard, who has a vested interest in promoting that boxing metaphor - in essence, this is Cinderella Man with verbal punches. But before the main bout comes the preliminaries, a montage designed to inform the uninitiated of the blood already spilled: A sitting president forced to resign because of abuse-of-power allegations arising from the Watergate scandal; almost immediately pardoned by his successor and thus allowed to remain unrepentant, never offering a wounded nation the confession it needs; now living in well-appointed exile at his seaside retreat, writing a self-serving memoir for a princely sum.
Enter, on the other side, Frost the featherbrain, or so it was perceived: Here was a comic who cut his teeth on satire, but had devolved into vacuous banter with empty-headed celebrities, and then slid off the map to some TV gig way Down Under. There, he hatched an unlikely plan to bag a Nixon interview and sell it to the highest bidder. At this early point, despite their vast differences, the opponents are also shown to hold two traits firmly in common: (1) a keen interest in making money and (2) an equally ardent desire to brush up their tarnished image.
This is where Morgan's script and the title cast - both Frank Langella and Michael Sheen are reprising much-applauded stage performances - nicely intersect, allowing the principals to explore these surprising similarities even while plumbing the obviously stark contrasts. For example, Sheen paints Frost as a buoyant and genial populist, aware of his critics but content to smile in their face. Serving as his own producer, he is basically a bottom-line impresario intent on mounting a lucrative show. In that sense, Sheen isn't far from his Tony Blair portrayal in The Queen (also written by Morgan) - each of these men has a keen appreciation for the value of political theatre.
So does Nixon, of course, a pol whose checkered past, that four-act litany of triumph and defeat and resurrection and disgrace, is nothing if not theatrical. No wonder the guy is a thespian's delight, and Langella takes every advantage. As the narrative progresses from pretaping negotiations to the interviews themselves, he resists the easy caricature and seizes the chance to roam across the full range of those deliciously Nixonian traits - the cunning thoughtfulness, the insecure confidence, the sacred profanity, the awkward charm, the self-pity palmed off as candour, and, above all, the weirdly inadvertent honesty, the face that always betrayed him by speaking the very truths that his mouth tried so hard to conceal. (His face was the video equivalent of the audio tapes he couldn't bring himself to burn.) Yes, Nixon was the sort of complicated bad actor that only a really good actor can play.
Prior to the big match, the movie finds a little comedy in the travails of the frustrated handlers in Frost's corner. Heavily armed with facts and figures, James Reston and Bob Zelnick (Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt) are desperate to give the villain "the trial he never had," but their undertrained boy is the picture of insouciance, a gadfly who, forever darting out to dine at chic eateries, still doesn't know his Haldeman from his Ehrlichman. So, as always in these Rocky-esque cases, the early rounds go to the favourite - Nixon bobs and weaves in masterfully rambling digressions. Only in the later going does the underdog land the climactic blow, forcing the sought-after admission and an apology of sorts: "I let down the country."
However, before this telling exchange, Frost elicits from Nixon a blunt assertion that would prove far more prophetic: "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Given a current administration that has governed on precisely that precept, the contemporary resonance is clear. But it's a resonance that the film doesn't actively pursue. Rather, it falls into a common and complacent trap, into the conventional wisdom that the legacy of Watergate represents the triumph of truth over lies, of justice served by hard-digging journalists and an eventually brave Congress.
But the competing view suggests that the actual lessons of Watergate, mastered by the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, are far less benign. In this interpretation, Nixon's failure was not in using lies and dirty tricks, but in misusing them, in not mastering the art of the lie. Over the next decades of campaigning, reaching its zenith in the Dubya White House, that art got refined to the point where the brazen falsehood (John Kerry was a Swift Boat coward, Saddam was behind 9/11) ceased to matter - all that counted, and all that the media discussed, was the spun lie's potential for political success.
At worst, these competing legacies are debatable, yet in Frost/Nixon, as in most Watergate revisitations, the debate doesn't even take place. Instead, once again, dogged virtue rises off the canvas to land the final punch, defeating villainy and bringing a sour chapter in American history to a sweet end. Shakespeare would have delighted in the chapter, especially in the antagonist, but not at the expense of the longer and darker and still-unfinished book.