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Michael Sheen and Frank Langella face off as David Frost and Richard Nixon |
He was a crook, but you’d never know it
FROST/NIXON
Directed by Ron Howard
HELLO, good evening, and welcome.
Tonight we are going to watch a bio-pic with a difference: the inside story of four interviews that were to help America exercise a political demon that had stalked the country in the 1970s.
It tells the story of how TV’s Mr Smooth, David Frost, decided he would bag a show with the disgraced former president and re-boot his career in the US.
In doing so, he came to realise the depth of anger ordinary Americans felt towards Nixon, and their feelings of disillusionment with the presidency after he spent much of his term cheating and lying.
Frost/Nixon worked originally as a play, and its enthralling in places.
Both the main leads are excellent, and are ably backed by a plethora of characters playing researchers and girlfriends.
We watch Frost, a man with no political convictions, set the interview up, struggle to raise the money to do so, and then tip toe through the big questions America want to hear asked.
As Frost and Nixon trade blows, the tension is provided by the feeling that this light-weight talk show host, this performer rather than political heavyweight, will bungle the chance to get Nixon sweating over his disgraceful actions. Then... Kapow!
He gets in there... and we all know what happened next.
There are moments of mirth – Nixon and Frost making small talk while sitting with hankies in their shirt collars to stop make-up marking them, and little asides about Frost’s private life.
It all creates a large picture for the main battle to play out on.
Sadly, the film fails to provide a sense of the banter between the two during the actual interviews: it would have been interesting to hear a little more of the schlump-headed excuses for Watergate Nixon came out with.
And there is also a sense that you could almost feel sorry for Nixon by the end of it – and I don’t want to.
His actions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Indo-China, and he was rotten to the core.
Yet as he shuffles about in his Pacific-view home, he looks like a broken old man who had the world in his hands but dropped it in the gutter.
Now, anyone fancy putting themselves forward to have a crack at Bush?
Russell Brand, Frank Skinner, Jonathan Ross: America needs you! |
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