Frost/Nixon Movie Review

In one corner, weighing in at over 900 pounds of freshly squeezed shame, the recently resigned President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon! And, in the other corner, weighing in at just 3 kilos of experience, the British talk-show host and laughingstock of the American media empire, David Frost! That’s how Peter Morgan, the British screenwriter made famous by The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, sets up his story about America’s most infamous ex-President.

It doesn’t feel like the story will be big enough to carry 122 minutes of screen time at first. Nixon resigns under the weight of the Watergate avalanche and withdraws to a California estate. David Frost, known then only as the host of several British talk shows, finds himself alongside the American media giants seeking an exit interview with the newly pardoned President.

After discussing his options with his new agent, played with comedic flair by Toby Jones, Nixon chooses Frost, who is both the highest bidder and the most inexperienced-seeming interviewer of the group. Frost struggles to fund the high-priced interviews while also preparing for them, ultimately conducting them on his own dime. It sounds like the making of an hour-long documentary at most, not a two-hour feature length production.

Something about the characters would have to carry the space. Frank Langella turns in an outstanding performance as the embattled Nixon. Rather than relying on cheap overused soundbites like “I am not a crook” — a line that thankfully never appeared in the script — Langella becomes Nixon, from his deep, gravelly voice to his nervous mannerisms and cocky swagger.

Michael Sheen (no relation to those Sheens) is brilliant as David Frost, a character that most of us don’t know and couldn’t appreciate a great impersonation of if we did. The hard work here was to make us care about the character at all, and Sheen’s portrayal is a complex mixture of silly and sad, moving toward an uncertain victory that everyone can cheer for over a dark villain that everyone roots against.

But Nixon isn’t all villain. In several conversations with Frost and with family members, and even in a brief exchange between Nixon and a bystander’s dog, Tricky Dick comes across as a real human with real emotions. Those who aren’t familiar with the intensity of the Watergate scandal and its aftermath might even leave the theater with a very sympathetic understanding of a man who made “mistakes of the heart, but not of the mind.”

This sympathetic yet sleazy Nixon, along with Frost, take up most of the screen time as the title suggests. But a small cast requires the right kind of support; Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Matthew MacFadyen, and Kevin Bacon do an excellent job of supplementing the Frost/Nixon duo without confusing the story.

To be fair, it didn’t do everything perfectly. A drunken, midnight call from Nixon to Frost is used to explain in excruciating detail just exactly what their adversarial interview represents. Morgan’s Britishness overtakes the American story here, and the whole struggle is boiled down to a class-versus-class battle more typical of English tales.

After their lengthy midnight conversation, Frost is inexplicably motivated to work harder than ever before to prepare for their final session the next day. These all-night preparations are assembled by way of, as you may have guessed, the studying montage. In a story with so much space to work with, it’s hard to forgive the use of such a tired device.

In spite of its small flaws, Frost/Nixon comes out remarkably well. There’s a small cast of excellent characters. There’s a love interest who doesn’t artificially overwhelm the story. There’s a historical representation of a real, simple story that isn’t dry or dull. And there are other stories beneath it, about an old man living with big mistakes and bigger consequences, and about a young man struggling to be taken seriously.

If you love history, or just a good story, you’ll adore Frost/Nixon.