In Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella and Michael
Sheen each play men aching for redemption. Langella's Richard Nixon longs to
rehabilitate his public image after the long national nightmare of Watergate
and a tidal wave of bad press and public derision. Sheen's David Frost, in
turn, wants to prove to a snickering world that he's more than just a
blow-dried entertainer, at home chatting with starlets and celebrities, but
woefully out of his league conducting a makeshift prosecution of a former
president of prodigious intellectual gifts and ferocious intensity. Ron Howard
directed the film, but its auteur is undoubtedly playwright-screenwriter Peter
Morgan (The Queen, The Deal, The
Last King Of Scotland),
who continues his ongoing exploration of the 20th century as filtered through
crucial interpersonal relationships.
Frost/Nixon dramatizes a legendary series
of interviews between Langella's disgraced former president and Sheen's
globetrotting international playboy, who wears his megawatt smile like armor.
Langella agrees to the interviews both as a way of picking up easy money and as
a means of finally conquering his old foe the television, that infernal beast
that helped cost him the 1960 election. Langella sees the interviews as
conversational blood sport, a verbal sparring match between himself and a
glass-jawed lightweight of a foe, but he underestimates his opponent and pays a
steep price for his arrogance. The film consequently has the emotional arc of a
sports movie, with the overmatched underdog enduring a vicious beating before
staging a stunning comeback.
Howard hammers home the boxing
metaphor a little too hard; he doesn't always trust the power of Morgan's words
and the mesmerizing performances of his perfectly cast leads. Yet Frost/Nixon finds an
intriguing new angle on one of history's most documented and fascinating figures.
In a masterful performance, Langella highlights Nixon's oily charm and guile;
there's a reason an ugly, unpleasant man with a hangdog face, gravelly voice,
perpetual 5 o'clock shadow, and sad eyes rose from nothing to become the most
powerful man in the world. This is Nixon at his debate-club-president best,
though he can only refrain from self-sabotage for so long. Sheen's Frost may
like to think he landed the knockout blow, but in the end, only Nixon can
defeat Nixon.