At no point during his legendary
Watergate interview with David Frost in 1977 did Richard Nixon ever weep
openly, beg viewers for forgiveness, rend his garments in shame, or announce to
Frost that he couldn't handle the truth. This is real life, not A Few Good
Men or …And Justice For All. The Frost/Nixon interviews were dramatic, funny, and
unlikely enough to inspire a Tony Award-winning play and now an acclaimed film,
but it was a muted, almost subtle form of drama where painful emotions
frequently hid behind thickets of legalese and technical arguments.
As recounted in Frost/Nixon, international television personality David Frost took an enormous risk in paying
disgraced former president Richard Nixon for a series of four exclusive
interviews. Frost was overmatched and outmaneuvered in the early going, but
staged a stunning comeback in a famed final interview where he genially
hammered Nixon on his complicity in the Watergate cover-up. In true underdog
tradition, Frost rose to glory when the stakes were the highest.
The Original Watergate
Interviews contains only the last of the four
installments, so audiences looking to experience the interviews in their
original context as the grand finale to an epic exploration of Nixon's life are
out of luck. Ever the savvy businessman, Frost has cut straight to the good
stuff. The interview starts off dryly, but Frost diligently lays out the
specifics of his case with prosecutorial zeal, and Nixon's stonewalling
eventually gives way to measured, anxious self-disclosure. Nixon's messy
tragicomic humanity comes to the fore in sad accounts of asking key aides to
resign, and the melancholy way he praises them as decent men caught up in the
maelstrom of history. With the scars of Watergate a distant memory, it's easy
now to identify with Nixon as well as Frost. Nixon is never more poignantly
human than when he stops arguing semantics and discusses the tremendous
personal cost of Watergate. In a strangely resonant turn of phrase, he argues
that he "impeached himself" by resigning. He memorably impeached himself a
second time through his words here.
Key features: Frost
reflects on the Nixon interviews in segments taped for the DVD.