Frost/Nixon is the name of a award-winning play that recreated the famous post-presidential interview of Richard Nixon and English talk show host David Frost. This movie is an adaptation of that play. So what we have is an adaptation of an adaptation. It’s weird than that this movie has an odd mockumentary vibe to it. By that I mean certain characters that witnessed the interviews interrupt the movie to speak of the events unfolding on the screen as if they already happened. It is used in the beginning and the end, but not during the middle. It’s weird because it throws the whole genre into question. Am I watching a straight up biopic, or a mockumentary of that biopic? And why isn’t it consistent?
I had the opportunity to watch some of the Frost/Nixon interview clips on YouTube before somebody was a real jerk and took them down because of a copyright. Watching those and then watching this movie I witnessed a real difference especially in the final supposedly most dramatic scenes. In the real interviews Frost seems like a perfectly capable interviewer. This is at odds with Michael Sheen’s portrayal of a complete boob. The real Richard Nixon is equally not so dramatic. In the movie the big line is “No I’m saying when the President does it, it’s not illegal.” Frank Langella milks this line for all its worth and it comes as if it some sort of Freudian slip. In the real interviews Richard Frost asks a completely different question (and a better one too) about wiretapping unsuspecting American citizens (In the movie the question is about Watergate.) It is sober and Nixon’s famous answer although still incredible seems at least somewhat thought out. This playing with the dialogue I found a little irresponsible especially when were dealing with an ex-president. Of course you may say, hey it’s just a movie. I would counter that the thing is up for a best picture nomination and people watching it will assume that the dialogue is actually verbatim. Therefore the filmmakers, Ron Howard, should have exercised a little more responsibility in keeping the record straight. I’m somewhat surprised by this because Ron Howard is usually very good at these biopic stories (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man). Anyway it still is an entertaining film. Just give the real interviews a look while you’re at it, just to be objective.
Frank Langella just got a best actor nomination for his portrayal of Richard Nixon. Not really knowing Richard Nixon I don’t know if it is good impression. I know he doesn’t look a thing like the man. If there is a great performance in this movie it doesn’t belong to Langella though. It belongs to Sam Rockwell, who brings a real vitality to his role as one of Frost’s leading investigator of Nixon. He does a very good job of representing the nation’s outrage against Richard Nixon. I looked him up on imdb and found out that I had already seen him in several other movies. (He was that dude in ‘The Green Mile?’) This is the first time I really noticed him though and thought ‘hey I think I’ll look that guy up.’ On the other side of fence is Kevin Bacon who plays the assistant of Richard Nixon. He’s a stalwart army guy. Its kind of nice to see Bacon playing supporting bits in movies with good casts again. Maybe a couple of years of this and we will be able to play his game again. It’s been getting kind of hard since he became a headliner around 1996 and stopped doing those sort of films.
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