Like Peter Morgan’s earlier The Queen (2006), Frost/Nixon is a spectacularly unimportant and specious piece of dramaturgy posing as incisive contemporary portraiture. Morgan, with The Queen, served up thunderously unsubtle symbolism, bullet-point-like exposition of themes fit for any overworked critic to quote as if they thought of it, and a portrait of contemporary political celebrities with about the level of insight of a “Behind the Music” episode rendered for Newsweek readers. In our current mainstream artistic atmosphere, this was mistaken for actual drama. Frost/Nixon, his follow-up, avoids the symbolism but retains the other aspects undiluted.
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.The film’s dramatic value depends on lying about David Frost’s reputation and abilities as a journalist and interviewer and about the impact these had on Richard Nixon’s amazing gall. Pairing Morgan’s material with Ron Howard’s direction defines new dimensions in blandness, and the first third of the film is unbearably cartoonish: Frank Langella’s dinner-party Nixon voice, Michael Sheen’s Carnaby haircut, and the scenes set in Australia where everyone sports an accent out of The Simpsons, are almost enough to make one hit the eject button.
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.The film does improve considerably once the supporting cast injects the kind of animation that threatens to resemble real life: Matthew Macfadyen, Oliver Platt, and Sam Rockwell as Frost’s three musketeers interact with real crackle; and Kevin Bacon, hovering at the edges as Jack Brennan, Nixon’s former chief of staff and handler, is a fine study in dour resentment.
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The real point of the film, watching the head-butting between interviewer and subject, is slick and reasonably engaging. As a combat of personalities, it gains some heat, as Langella’s characterisation becomes more intimate, and Sheen marvellously portrays a man who galvanises under pressure: as in The Queen, he far outshines the headline turn by the grand thespian.
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The real point of the film, watching the head-butting between interviewer and subject, is slick and reasonably engaging. As a combat of personalities, it gains some heat, as Langella’s characterisation becomes more intimate, and Sheen marvellously portrays a man who galvanises under pressure: as in The Queen, he far outshines the headline turn by the grand thespian.
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.But there’s nothing of actual meat here. Morgan’s impression of Nixon seems to have already been filtered through a dozen other portraits; and the portrayal of Frost as a chirpy lightweight who has to find his eye of the tiger reeks of one pseudo-intellectual scalp-hunting another pseudo-intellectual. Morgan’s dialogue often feels like it’s been cut and pasted from other texts, from Brennan’s ludicrously corny line about hippies who spat on him after coming back from Vietnam, through to Rockwell’s concluding summary speech that suggests a first-year academic essay. The film is finally tolerable.
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