When debonair British TV host David Frost sat down for a series of detailed interviews with disgraced former President Richard Nixon in 1977, it resulted in an absorbing television event.
But maybe not the kind of thing you make a movie about.
Nevertheless, here’s “Frost/Nixon.” It’s based on a successful play by Peter Morgan, the man who wrote “The Queen,” another piece of speculative recent history.
The film’s main source of suspense is whether the lightweight Frost will be eaten alive by Nixon, a canny and paranoid political warrior.
In the play, that might have been enough to create a potent little time capsule. But the film’s director, Ron Howard, is not content to let well enough alone, and so he hypes up the subtle drama of the situation with a lot of unnecessary fuss.
Frost (played by Michael Sheen) chances upon the idea of interviewing Nixon shortly after the Watergate-beleaguered president has resigned. Frost’s own career is sagging, and he’s willing to spend a lot of money to snag Nixon’s time.
Nixon (Frank Langella) is puttering about the California beach and happy to pocket the $600,000 fee for the interviews. For Frost and his team (including researchers played by Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell), months of work go into their preparation, yet the odds seem stacked in favor of the wily — you might almost say tricky — Dick Nixon.
Howard adopts the form of a mockumentary at times, allowing the supporting characters to address the camera and talk about the process. I can’t imagine what Howard thought he was doing with this, since the effect is to repeat to the audience something they already see with their own eyes.
The bogus style harms a potentially intriguing match-up, especially when you’ve got the two deft actors who originated the roles on stage. Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in “The Queen,” knows just how to sell the playboy surface of Frost, but also suggest some nerve beneath the whitened smile.
It takes a minute or two to get used to Langella, but this fine actor does inhabit Nixon, and does a particularly good job with body language. As good as he is, Langella misses one level of Nixon’s unbearably awkward persona: He doesn’t get to the depths of Nixon’s immense self-pity, which so often expressed itself in bitter laughter.
Nixon was a self-defeating personality of Shakespearean size, which makes it disappointing that the movie settles for a quick-sketch approach that gives him a few traits to distinguish him from Frost. Only one scene, invented by Morgan, gives the Nixon essence: a drunk late-night phone call between the two adversaries.
Maybe a purely fictional approach (check out Robert Altman’s wildly weird “Secret Honor,” with Philip Baker Hall as Nixon) gets closer to the truth than this kind of half-baked docudrama. Because despite the immensely watchable actors, “Frost/Nixon” succeeds as neither docu nor drama.
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