"I Gave Them A Sword"

Rating: 9/10 (1 January 2009)

When you take on the role of someone so identifiable in the public mind as Richard M. Nixon you'd better have the acting chops for the job. Nixon is so easy to caricature whether gently or acidly. After the Watergate scandal broke, the caricatures became more and more acid indeed.
That was the challenge that Frank Langella met and overcame. In his performance he never once slipped into a David Frye like imitation, though honestly I kept expecting him to throughout the film as I watched it. He was Nixon right down to the dark recesses of his troubled soul. A terribly private man who chose the most public of all professions to engage in. A man of poor background who could not forget the snubs of adolescence. A brilliant man capable of initiatives in governance like the opening of Communist China. A cynical man because he advocated policies that kept China closed for years to America.
The other half of Frost/Nixon is the charming British talk show host David Frost who bet his whole career on getting an interview with one of the most despised figures in the world and getting him to open up on television. In retrospect it was obvious that Frost was the guy for the job. Someone in the hard news field like Mike Wallace would never have gotten in the door to see Nixon.
Unlike Nixon, David Frost is still with us and apparently voiced no complaints about Michael Sheen, not of the Sheen/Estevez acting clan of the USA, playing him. Sheen also responds with a good characterization and captures David Frost as I remember him from the Seventies and Eighties.
Frost/Nixon ran for 137 performances last year on Broadway and director Ron Howard had the good sense to cast Langella and Sheen in the roles they originated there. Langella got a Tony Award and will probably get an Oscar nomination.
Best scene in the film is an inebriated Richard Nixon calling David Frost one night and revealing one nasty side to Frost. Sheen's facial expressions as Langella raves on the phone tell everything.
Kevin Bacon is in the cast as Nixon's chief aide in retirement Jack Brennan. There's a bit of Oliver North in Bacon's portrayal, the loyal former Marine who can't forget who was his commander-in-chief during Vietnam and appreciates him if no others do. Brennan also can't forget he felt a stranger in his own country with people despising him for his service. In the recent election, surviving Nixon people supported former POW John McCain against Republican rivals for the nomination. In my state of New York, McCain's campaign was headed by Nixon's son-in-law Edward Cox.
Bacon's loyal Brennan is ironic also because it was Nixon's aides, aides mostly acquired in his eight years between his defeat by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and his election in 1968 that were the ones that did Nixon in. I've often wondered if Nixon had been elected in 1960 would we have seen a Watergate because all the names associated with that scandal were people who would have never been in a Nixon presidency then.
Frost/Nixon is a fascinating look at a tortured soul who wound up in the most powerful position in the world. There may be some Academy gold for this film and you can also believe that Nixon will continue to fascinate people for years.