Ron Howard introduces us to a new type of "courtroom drama"

Rating: 10/10 (6 December 2016)

If you're going to this movie thinking you are just going to see another movie about Watergate, you will have to quickly adjust your thinking. I know, because that is what happened to me. This is a riveting and gut- wrenching movie about two men locked in a personal battle to use each other in order to change their public images. Neither is totally prepared for the contest that will be played out on the world TV stage. To be sure, this is a "no holds barred" showdown. But both Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) and David Frost (Michael Sheen who played Tony Blair in The Queen (2006) underestimate each other's public skills.
To Nixon, David Frost is seen as just a second-rate British talk show host. To David Frost, the Nixon interviews are his ticket to do something that no other TV talk show host or reporter had managed to do: to get Nixon on record admitting something about himself that he had not heretofore publicly done.
Frost, pushed by his fellow producers, wants Nixon to publicly take responsibility for the Watergate cover-up and for his own personal complicity in the final aspects of the Viet Nam War. As you watch this movie, you find yourself, at first, empathizing with David Frost who is in something big--but WAY over his head. Later, as you see the preparation for the interviews (on both sides), you feel empathyâ€”yes, empathy--for Richard Nixon!!
Both Oliver Stone, in Nixon (1995), and Ron Howard, in this movie, seem to have taped Richard Nixon as a figure of the high tragedy akin to a figure from a Greek tragedy or one of the "big four tragedies" of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello. In each of these Shakespearian tragedies, the title character has an innate tragic flaw in their character that brings them down from great and powerful heights. While it may have been JEALOUSY with Othello or LUST FOR POWER with Macbeth, with Nixon it seems to always be the need for REVENGE on his enemies (real or imagined): those people that look down on him as socially or intellectually unworthy to hold power.
With this movie, Ron Howard has expertly introduced us to a new type of "courtroom drama." But, this "courtroom" takes the form of a series of TV interviews. The parties present their own arguments, and we are the jury.
Howard effectively uses extreme close up shots to tighten the space and heighten the interpersonal drama. With his skill, Howard draws us into the drama and barely gives time to blink. Both my wife and I left the movie emotionally drained but dramatically fulfilled.