A retrospective retrospective; but good

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2009)

In 1976, David Frost interviewed Richard Nixon. Journalists speaks to politician – it hardly seems like big news. But Frost was an ambitious talk show host on the make, Nixon had been silent since falling from power, and in the event, many considered the resulting interviews revealing. Still, why make a film about the interviews instead of re-showing the originals? It's true, there's an interesting story to how Frost raised his own money to buy Nixon's participation, but Ron Howard's film fails to make this story wholly dramatic – he chooses to present the background in pseudo-documentary style, with his actors giving in-character interviews. He could, of course, have directly interviewed the real protagonists; but this would have punctured the film's recreated world, where Martin Sheen is Frost and Frank Langella is Nixon. Sheen is as good as he was playing Tony Blair, another smooth talking intellectual lightweight; although in both cases, he just misses capturing the full star quality of the original. Langella seems more statesmanlike than his model, less shifty - Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's 'Nixon' was more like I imagine the man, although that's really the whole point – that what we are seeing is an imagining, albeit firmly grounded in public facts. Nixon died with his reputation un-recovered, but has proved the inspiration for a multitude of movies and even an opera. Meanwhile, the avuncular John Birt, a widely disliked bureaucrat during his later tenure at the BBC, must never have expected to model a major supporting role in a Hollywood film. In Frost's case, one imagines, the expectations were different.