Engaging and worth watching

Rating: 6/10 (9 November 2009)

The film is framed by shots of TV cameras from Nixon's point of view - at the beginning the camera Nixon is resigning into and at the end the camera into which he apologizes. As one of the characters states, the movie is about the "reductive power of television." Nixon understands this, tries very hard to manipulate TV to his advantage, and fails. He's haunted by TV from his earliest debates to the very end. (Is the scene with the dog intended to further drive home this point by reminding the audience of the 'Checkers' speech?) A complete opposite approach from Nixon, Frost builds a career by embracing the shallowness of TV and is ultimately rewarded for it. Excellent performances all around, nice interplay between the two main characters over a pair of shoes.
The movie is probably about as exciting as it possibly can be, despite the fact that it is about a TV interview. In the end, like an old western the main characters face each other alone, with even their support teams watching from separate rooms through the filter of television.
Sure to attract and entertain US history buffs, the movie will inevitably be compared to 'All the President's Men' but should not be. Neither this movie nor the interviews have the same level of historical significance as the reporters uncovering the actual events. In other words, don't expect 'Frost/Nixon' to replace 'All the President's Men' in your high school history classroom anytime soon. A more apt comparison would be to the movie 'Quiz Show' - this movie feels like the 1970s in the same way 'Quiz Show' felt like the 1950s, and it attempts to add some depth to the dimensions of the characters we watch on TV. Another comparison that comes to mind is to the recent Richard Gere movie 'The Hoax' - Gere's character approaches and pushes his project with the same intensity as Frost in this film.