Oversimplified Retelling of a Defining Moment of Television

Rating: 6/10 (21 July 2009)

The story of the Frost interviews of Richard Nixon has the raw materials to build a fascinating film but it's a fundamentally disappointing effort that fails to make best use of one of television's greatest moments. The script turns the interviews into a boxing contest, a comparison highlighted by various characters throughout the film, and makes it a battle of personality between two men desperate to get back into the mainstream American consciousness. However, real life never fits so easily around the stereotypes of film and the script and director sacrifice a lot of the real character of these two men to fit them into this structure. One half of this equation is fine, Michael Sheen has plenty ability to manoeuvre in his portrayal of David Frost because, as with all the great interviewers, we never really got a sense of his values and personality in real life.
Sheen's Frost is a chancer, desperate to get back into the big time of American television and more than willing to risk his career on doing so. Here Frost is so desperate for an interview that he believes will put him on the television map that he outbids the networks without any knowledge of how to earn the money back and places himself in a financial black hole. He has to spend so much of his time chasing advertisers and establishing his own network for a night that he cannot properly prepare for the interview. Here one of Britain's most established television personalities is reimagined as an out of his depth talk show host without any political opinion. Sheen provides a compelling character and wears the stress of the situation all over his face while maintaining a permanent fake cheery grin. Is a fantastic portrayal of a character so often portrayed in the sports movies this film draws its inspiration from, the lowly idealist with one chance of greatness.
The problems lie on the other side of the title, Richard Nixon may be one of the most psychoanalysed presidents in history and his personality is simply too famous to mould to a film script. Langella imitates the President rather than becoming him and the script bends him to fit a stereotype necessary for its morality play. Langella is unable to portray a consistent character as too often the script demands he veer from wild anger to detached cynicism. At one point showing him unable to tell anecdotes and small talk, about another showing him distracting Frost before a taping session with an easy chatty style of conversation. When Nixon doesn't feel like Nixon the interviews themselves get taken out of context and the film loses the moment when all the arrogance and paranoia the man was famous for slide away to reveal a broken human being. It's that moment which makes the interviews so famous and it's when the film quotes them word for word that it's at its best. Even a film that fails in so many regards as this cannot fail to showcase the sheer power of the interviews as a piece of political theatre, a moment in the maligned history of television news beyond compare.
The staging of the film is directly derived from sports movies, even as far as the "corner men" as they are referred to in the movie. Both Nixon and Frost have Teams of advisers that sit in rooms away from the interview and narrate the action like the omniscient commentators in every sports film from Rocky to Cool Runnings to Dodgeball. Ron Howard has always liked his control room yelling and cheering scenes, most notably in Apollo 13, and here is no exception. The characters themselves are wastes of fine acting talent, Kevin Bacon is reduced to playing the most stereotypical of Nixon advices to the point where he can barely open his mouth without accusing hippies of taking down his man, and Sam Rockwell is given barely anything to do as a passionate Nixon hater. Perhaps most laughable is the bureaucrat's bureaucrat John Birt being reinvented as a daring and commanding producer. Liberties are taken with the truth everywhere in an effort to fit this into a Hollywood model. In probably the film's lowest point a large part of the plot revolves around a completely fabricated phone call between Nixon and Frost, in fact the only reason the phone call exists is lazy scriptwriting. Peter Morgan is unable to communicate the shared paranoia that Nixon and Frost have about being shut out of their respective fields so simply has Nixon call Frost and tell him they have a shared paranoia. It's not just bad writing it also loses the authenticity needed for the film, and shows the lack of vision of those involved. They cannot see beyond the standard film plot so bend this amazing truth to be that much less interesting and that much more film like.
This is ultimately what makes the film such a disappointing exercise; it's too concerned with itself as a film and again proves that not every tale works in that context. The irritating this is, with a director with more ingenuity and a better actor portraying Nixon, this could have been an excellent film. The sheer magnetism of the interviews themselves and Nixon as a real life character should have made it an easy adaptation to write but instead we have a diverting but paper thin story of enigmatic charmer David Frost versus bruising old curmudgeon Richard Nixon.