Nixon’s Final Humiliation: A Review of “Frost/Nixon”

As with Another Year in 2010, my favourite movie of 2008 was one that was for the most part overlooked, in this case Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon.

In 1977 brash and ambitious British talk-show host David Frost (played by Michael Sheen) managed to convince disgraced former president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) to grant a series of television interviews. To lure Nixon to the cameras Frost used $600,000 he did not have and a reputation as a soft-pedaling interviewer who would not pose difficult questions, particularly about Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Frost was confident that the U.S. networks would be falling over each other to purchase the interviews.

But he had miscalculated: his reputation, and his perceived pretentiousness in out-scooping them, turned the networks off and they refused to have anything to do with the project. Frost was now forced into a desperate scramble for sponsors, which, along with the constant need to reassure investors—and in fact to squeeze even more funding out of them—makes up part of the drama of the movie.

But the real drama is in the interviews themselves. The fear on the side of the Frost team and the general consensus among the media savvy is that Nixon will control the interviews and use them in an attempt to exonerate himself. In fact, the former president hopes they will springboard him back into political life.

The taping, conducted in the home of a “Republican businessman,” starts out just as everyone had expected. Despite being blindsided by Frost’s opening question in the first interview (“Why didn’t you burn the tapes?”), the wily Nixon quickly seizes control of the sessions with labyrinthine explanations of White House internal procedure, lengthy anecdotes, and clever self-justification. Frost lacks the experience and the journalistic ruthlessness to go on the attack. His team is frantic.

Nixon again trumps the British interviewer in the second taping session, on Vietnam. The third session, on foreign policy, looms as disaster. Frost overhears one if his American political advisors comment, “So if he beats him up like that on Vietnam, imagine what he’s going to do with his real achievements.” The third interview is in fact so bad that two members of the crew are overheard to say “they never voted for him when they had the chance, but if he ran for office again today, he’d get their support.” Frost’s team is furious but the talk-show host remains relentlessly upbeat and challenges anyone “who thinks we’re going to fail” to leave the project. No one does.

The turning point comes when Frost, alone his hotel room despairing over his failure to secure sponsors, receives a call from Nixon, who has obviously had a few drinks. Nixon delivers an angry, self-pitying monologue in which he compares his humble background, his current plight and his hunger for exoneration and the limelight to Frost’s. Frost recognizes how desperate Nixon is to “win” the final contest—over Watergate—and the fate of the “loser,” a fate that each of them dreads: obscurity.

While the outcome of the final interview is well known to those of my generation, I will not reveal it here. Suffice it to say that the Watergate session is the dramatic high-point of the movie. The contest between Frost and Nixon and the interviewer’s attempt to steer Nixon into an apology for the Watergate cover-up are deeply engaging.

The performances of the two principals in this film are nothing short of brilliant. Sheen’s portrayal of a man whose oversized ego may have finally gotten the better of him but whose steely nerve and unbreakable will push him out of despair is nuanced and convincing.

Langella’s turn as Nixon is in my opinion the best acting performance of 2008. A few years ago, I attended a live HD broadcast of the New York Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly. The female lead, Cio Cio San, a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl, was played by a corpulent white soprano who had to be at least 45 years old. I believe I even laughed out loud when she first came on stage. By the second act, however, her acting and singing had me convinced that she was Cio Cio San. While the disparity in appearance between Langella and Nixon is not nearly as great, it took several scenes for the actor to be transformed in my mind to his subject; the transformation, once it was made, was complete. Even in the close-up scenes of the interviews, I believed I was watching Richard Nixon. The drunken monologue prior to interview four is equalled in its magic only by Viola Davis’s heart-breaking encounter with Sister Aloysius in Doubt.

Frost/Nixon is no more a political film than Doubt is religious or theological. It is a very human story, a story of self-delusion, disappointed ambition, and wasted talent beautifully rendered by the acting of Sheen and Langella and by the cinematography of Salvatore Totino and the editing of Dan Hanley, Mike Hill, and Robert Komatsu.

Photo Credit

Movie Poster @ Wikipedia

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