Frost/Nixon
Matching wits: 'Frost/Nixon' plays with the history of the famous post-Watergate interviews
In 1962, bruised and shaken by his loss in California's gubernatorial election, Richard Nixon infamously told the press, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." How wrong can one man have been? Forty-six years later and 14 after his death, we're still kicking Tricky Dick around. He's a generational shibboleth - the dark, graceless hole at the center of the baby boomers' enduring nightmares.
"Frost/Nixon" resurrects him one more time, just to give audiences a jowl-wobbling "boo!" as the Obama era dawns. Yet it doesn't take. Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up. In the name of dramatizing history, "Frost/Nixon" sacrifices it.
This was always the trap of the modern Great Figure biopic, of course, and no one has done more to enticingly lay the snare than playwright-turned-screenwriter Peter Morgan. With 2006's "The Queen," Morgan humanized the public statuary that is HM Queen Elizabeth II; "The Last King of Scotland" (2006) and "The Other Boleyn Girl" (2008) were urgent, gossipy dramas about the courts of, respectively, Idi Amin and Henry VIII.
I didn't see the original stage production of Morgan's "Frost/Nixon," but its very title reflects its status as a two-hander: a pair of men sitting in chairs talking. Since one of them is Richard Milhous Nixon (Langella), three years after resigning the presidency in disgrace, there's already a built-in fascination.
Morgan stokes further suspense by presenting the British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) as a thoroughgoing lightweight - all trendy shirts and dollybirds on the side. His 1977 offer to Nixon for a series of four televised interviews appears to be a foolhardy gamble, one which the ex-president, sensing the chance to repair his ruined reputation, accepts with a cagey smile.
Howard has by now become Hollywood's foremost exponent of middlebrow "serious" entertainment, and he stages the run-up to the interviews with great flair. Sheen's Frost is a wide-eyed naïf who can score a girlfriend on an airplane trip (the gifted Rebecca Hall of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," here simply to give the audience something to look at among all the posturing men), but he seems clueless on matters of policy, politics, and history.
To the despair of those working with him - British producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen), and journalists Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) - Frost seems barely interested in obtaining the Nixonian admission of guilt they feel the country - indeed, the world - needs. Reston especially is out for blood; in the film's color-by-numbers approach, he represents the outraged left while Zelnick is the cynical, non-ideological media insider. (Accordingly, Rockwell barks and Platt purrs; they make an engaging Beltway Abbott and Costello.)
Over in the Nixon camp, chief of staff Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon in tearful ramrod mode) frets over the uncertainty of it all while agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar (a delightful Toby Jones) cackles and counts Frost's half-million dollars, all of it paid upfront by the talk-show host. And then there's the wounded bear at the center of the ring: Langella's Tricky Dick.
The actor looks nothing like the man, really - that lean, once-beautiful face has to work at seeming flabby and suspicious. Langella is a performer of natural grace playing a notoriously awkward man, and he can't quite smooth the smoothness out of his approach. Yet in re-creating his Tony-winning stage triumph, Langella gets the post-Watergate Nixon's physical and psychological stoop, and he gets other things, too: the petty love of money that keeps bringing Nixon back to the bargaining table, the pride in his many political accomplishments, the use of long-winded anecdotes to charm and to stall.
Turned down by the networks and forced to syndicate the series himself, Frost ended up holding the meetings in the California living room of a local Republican supporter; on the actual videotapes, you can hear planes pass overhead. Here's where "Frost/Nixon" gets down to business: the prizefight between a newcomer and an aging pugilist. Frost lets Nixon blather and stonewall while his colleagues rend their hair in the background, but eventually the facts and the need for drama dictate that Watergate must come up and Nixon must fall.
In the process, "Frost/Nixon" cuts and pastes the order of events in ways that make for a digestible and lightly provocative night at the movies, provided you don't mind much who said what when. Nixon's smoking-gun admission that "when the president does it, it's not illegal" has been moved to a point where it becomes the domino that threatens to finally destroy his composure; only Brennan's intervention saves the ex-president from a public meltdown. But then, Nixon has already privately exposed his dark, ugly demons in a drunken late-night phone call to Frost's hotel room that serves as the movie's climactic fulcrum.
That phone call never happened; neither did Brennan's demanding a temporary halt to the taping the following day. Does it matter? Should it matter? Does the cinema's illusion of verisimilitude - of "the way things really happened" - demand greater responsibility to history than a stageplay? If you think it doesn't, add an extra star to the top of this review and go with a clean conscience. Allow some of us to suggest, however, that there's a difference between imagining what Queen Elizabeth or Idi Amin might have said behind closed doors and fiddling with recorded testimony about one of the greatest political crises in American history.
The Frost/Nixon interviews, available on DVD and well worth the rental, are compelling drama on their own, of course. "Frost/Nixon" represents only a tidying up, a shaping of lumpy public narrative into an object fit for an evening's consumption. That's an entertaining aim but a much lesser one, and it glibly humanizes Nixon without solving the mystery of this uncomfortable, able, self-destructive man. (Nor does it solve the mystery of Frost, who at the end of the film is as much an empty suit as at the beginning. Perhaps that's the point.)
If nothing else, the film marks the latest step in Frank Langella's remarkable late-career resurgence. He may have been too pretty for stardom in his youth, or not interested enough in the movies, but in old age, with his William Paley in "Good Night, and Good Luck" and his Leonard Schiller in "Starting Out in the Evening," Langella has taken risks that have paid off with insight and force.
Here he goes in for imposture, but it's that of a seasoned and intelligent actor - an essayist in human types. Langella boils the familiar presidential mannerisms to their essence, gathering them around the embers of a man forever resentful over being shunted off the stage too early. It's a most sympathetic portrait of a statesman-villain, one that matches the current, post-Bush view of the 37th president as a tragic figure rather than a scoundrel. Once again, the movies have given us not the Nixon that was but the Nixon we need.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation. 