CityLife

Frost/Nixon

HISTORIC MEETINGS: Frost and Nixon

LIKE this week’s other big film Milk, the action in Frost/Nixon takes place in the late Seventies.  

Coincidence, or a realisation just how controlled and anodyne contemporary politics are by comparison?

Isn’t it almost impossible to imagine the modern equivalent of this – albeit fictionalised in this context – confrontation between a former President and a TV personality?

Do you think George W Bush will feel any pressure to explain the mess in Iraq to anyone, let alone the likes of Jonathan Ross or Graham Norton, anytime soon? Of course not.

But those were different times and the spin-doctors didn’t control everything in the lives of our politicians, down to the smallest detail.

Of course, this is not only removed in time from the real events that inspired it, but also by the various levels of artifice that happen when real-life becomes a play that then becomes a film.

In fact, if Frost/Nixon has a fundamental problem, it’s that age-old issue of stage to screen – just how much can you open up the action without it becoming something with no relation at all to the original piece of work?

Clarified

What might need to be clarified at this stage is that David Frost at the time was by no means a heavyweight interviewer.

In fact, it’s widely thought that one of the reasons Nixon agreed to be interviewed by him at all was because he was sure he could run rings around this lightweight celebrity interviewer, then in his own exile in Australia.

Frost (portrayed in a typically astonishing performance from Michael Sheen) was at a low ebb professionally and had gambled all his own money on the interviews because nobody, including his own former acquaintances in British TV had any faith at all that he could pull it off.

Thus, the film begins as a fascinating inside look at the TV news business and then tightens into a spellbinding thriller.

As Nixon (a tour-de-force from Frank Langella) sidetracks Frost or falls back on tedious, time-wasting anecdotes.

Meanwhile, Frost’s team, including experienced TV newsman Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and researcher James Reston (Sam Rockwell), grow more and more desperate.

How on earth is this playboy interviewer going to outwit a politician accustomed to running a whole country, if not the world? 

This all sets the stage for a fictionialised scene that is the crucial moment in the story, when a drunken Nixon calls Frost late at night.

The next day, he doesn’t remember the call, but did he really have a need to confess?

Was Frost actually saved by this, rather than Reston’s dramatic, last-minute discovery – an improbably Hollywood moment, incidentally, but essentially accurate but most accounts.

This is a fascinating, adult film. Langella and Sheen do not merely mimic their characters (always a problem with bio-pics) but, somehow, manage to embody them, or at least our perception of these larger-than-life characters.

Howard, always an efficient director, uses authentic locations and period details, but, crucially, doesn’t allow these trappings to distract you from these two compelling and intense performances.

What did you think? Have your say.