Fires on all Cylinders

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2008)

Exuding class and almost effortless direction, Frost/Nixon is Ron Howard's best film in a while. But before giving him all the credit, what's worth mentioning is that the film succeeds so well mainly because Peter Morgan had already given the director a brilliant, juicy script to work with. Without it, cries of boredom may well have been heard, as let's face it, this is a film merely about a few interviews between two men. So its success definitely has more to do with the writing and the performances than the direction, but Howard does create a sleek and perfectly paced two hours - no mean feat in itself when you have such a dialog driven setup. To make it compelling, almost edge of your seat material as well, is even more of an accomplishment. Ultimately, the combination of Morgan's muscular writing and Howard's increasingly developing flair behind the camera has proved a real winner.
Within that combination is a fantastic cast from the ground up, and all you can really do when the film settles in is just sit back and be thankful. The performances after all are what makes this film so damn engrossing. Playing the titular characters, the transition from stage to screen for Michael Sheen and Frank Langella is smooth and without a doubt, performing such intense work together for so long has benefited the film adaptation. They are both outstanding, but one can't go past singling out Langella as Nixon. He inhabits the man to jaw dropping effect and by the end, the actor has all but vanished inside the former disgraced president, right down to the slouch and mumbling, gruff speech. A strong supporting cast of Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt amongst others gives weight around the two leads and everybody is on top form.
The decision to inter-cut after the fact reflections from those side players was a good move by Howard and it gives the whole thing more of a sense of an event - a historical one at that, and definitely adds to the cinematic feel Frost/Nixon has. It was a little off putting the first couple of times but overall breaking up the flow of the story like this helped tell it and fittingly gives us the point of view of everybody involved as opposed to just our two prize fighters.
In the end, the films exploration of the power of television in an era when a lot of people still probably didn't realize it the way Frost did, to Nixon's deflated arrogance towards the end when Frost lands his 'confession' and the close up - the one you can't hide from - showing a man full of self-loathing and that moment's potential impact on 45 million viewers, is drama at it's best. The scene is the crux from which the whole film and indeed, the interviews themselves, were built around and if Langella didn't pull it off, the film would have been deflated unimaginatively. Of course he does, and even though he'd had the stage play to perfect it, it's still one of the most bravura performances in a long time.