You're so static

Rating: 5/10 (28 October 2009)

Ironically and coincidentally I came to view this movie just days after finally watching "All The President's Men" - cause and effect, before and after, call it what you will, I have to say that "Frost/Nixon" made far less of an impression on me. Of course I appreciate the stylistic and narrative differences between the films, but as someone with an interest in recent "current affairs", I was disappointed by this latest Ron Howard movie.
Adapted from a critically successful play, I feel the movie never gets over the fact that it's a dramatisation of a series of television interviews - heaven help the upcoming film on the Bobby Fischer / Boris Spassky chess match from the early 70's I've been reading about in the upcoming schedules. While important in giving us insight into the final deconstruction of an already disgraced president, the movie has too great a conception of its own self-importance and I would argue that this examination of Tricky Dicky Nixon doesn't justify a two hour feature some 30 years on.
There are also, for me, some too obvious character-traits handed out to the Frost & Nixon characters, being Frost's playboy dilettantism and Nixon's money-grasping bent. I also was thrown slightly by the lack of physical resemblance of the two main characters (if anything, Frank Langhella looks more like Ronald Reagan) and the fact that neither actor quite nails the distinctive voices of their real-life counterparts. Then there's the much commented-on dubiously invented drunken telephone-call from Nixon to Frost before the final interview, highlighting too obviously his paranoia (he even tapes the call!).
Knowing pretty much the outcome also diluted the dramatic tension and the "big" moment when Frost finally pries out Nixon's confession to illegality is also skewered by the too-cinematic reactions of the interested parties looking on.
As to Howard's direction, I feel that the on-screen interview scenes could have been presented more tautly and that the framing device of post-event "interviews" with the actors playing the supporting characters was too clever for its own good. As for the acting, as stated I never really felt I was watching Frost and Nixon at all and was reminded of the Kevin Costner "starrer" "11 Days" which using similar cinematic devices got over far better the import of its subject matter - namely the Cuban Air Crisis of 1961. The action here is all in the dialogue, crippling the movie with a sense of stasis from which it never really elevates.
On the whole then, though a bold enterprise by the production team, I'm not sure that this particular play warranted the movie treatment. I'm now scurrying through You Tube and the like for the original footage of the interviews. Sometimes you don't need the background to the main event, sometimes the event itself is enough.