The Main Event.

Rating: 6/10 (7 November 2009)

The four interviews David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon, the resigned ex-president in his first public outing, were exchanges of information about incidents and the reasons behind them.
For added dramatic impact, the writers beef up the emotional and moral load carried by each of the two teams. Frost, a TV celebrity, has lost much of his audience and is making a come back by paying for this production. Nixon has a lot to lose as well. Too many unanswered questions about Watergate hang over his head.
The film tries strenuously to take sides. Nixon should be the heavy of the piece. He should break down sobbing on camera under Frost's barrage of penetrating questions.
That's the usual formula but it doesn't apply very directly in this case. Nixon defends himself handily and seems at ease and unpretentious. Frank Langella, as Nixon, does his best to invest the character with an explosive kind of anger. I remember from the real interviews, Nixon's statement that if the president does it, it's not illegal. In context, it seemed to me that he was arguing (with a polite and conspiratorial smile) that no president would do something illegal. The way the line is handled by Langella and his director, Ron Howard, it sounds as if Nixon means that the president can do anything he likes, regardless of the legality of the act.
Michael Sheen is David Frost and we learn little about him except that he desperately wants the project to be a success. Subsidiary characters help us fill in the blanks and keep us informed about how they'd like viewers to feel.
I didn't vote for Nixon but I could never understand the hatred he inspired in some of his critics. He couldn't do anything right. He was despised for eating cottage cheese with ketchup on it, just as our current commander-in-chief is blamed by his enemies for reading speeches from a teleprompter and appointing "czars". The logic behind the criticisms is the same, in that there is no logic. Nixon virtually opened China to the West but all people remember about him is his silent-movie villainous eyebrows and Watergate.
At the end of the final interview, Nixon admits making "errors of the heart" and failing the American people. The camera lingers on the man's gloomy face and this is interpreted by commentators as loneliness and self loathing. The cast and crew have turned a sad expression into the breakdown of Captain Queeg and treated it as a giant victory for David Frost.
I wound up feeling sorry for Nixon, as some of his biographers have done, Stephen Ambrose and Oliver Stone among them, even when they've begun with the intention of hacking Nixon to pieces.