Review: Frost/Nixon

35 years after Watergate, it's hard to adequately convey just how significant those events really were. I remember, as a pre-teen, hearing the word "Watergate" on the news every night, and eventually being so disappointed when it turned out that it was "only" a building in Washington where some burglars working for one party (Richard Nixon's Republican administration) had bugged a political headquarters belonging to the other party (the Democratic National Committee). My young mind had expected Watergate to be revealed as the codename for some secret branch of the Nixon government that was assassinating political rivals or wiping out foreign countries. Little did I know that it would be another decade still, amid the shadowy rule of Ronald Reagan, before we'd get those sorts of conspiratorial charges leveled at a sitting president!

As history has shown, Nixon's greatest mistake was his decision to try to cover up what had transpired at the Watergate office. He apparently valued loyalty above all else, and so made what could only be described as an ill-considered attempt to make the whole mess go away, obstructing justice in the process. Or, perhaps, he was simply corrupt through and through, and had actually initiated the dirty tricks himself. That latter scenario was never reliably proven; the cover-up, on the other hand, became increasingly obvious as the days fell off the calendar between the break-in in June of 1972 and his resignation (the first ever by a U.S. President) 26 months later. Eighteen and a half minutes of missing White House recordings (all of the conversations were taped in those days, thanks to President Lyndon B Johnson) seemed to confirm that Nixon had done something that he didn't want the world to know about, as did his initial refusal to turn the tapes over at all. Over that two-year stretch, even the staunchest Nixon supporters were pushed to the breaking point, and the United States of America endured perhaps its greatest loss of trust between its people and its government (despite George W. Bush's best efforts to top Nixon). If you're under the age of 30 and have taken it for granted your entire life that "all politicians are crooked", you can lay more of the blame for that bias at the feet of "Tricky Dick" Nixon than with anyone else.

With all of that as background, I went into Frost/Nixon with a great deal of interest sprinkled with a healthy dollop of doubt. After all, the Nixon interviews that David Frost conducted in 1977 came long after the excitement had died down to some degree: Nixon had resigned 3 years earlier, Ford had replaced him and promptly pardoned his former boss, and Jimmy Carter had swept Ford out of office in the 1976 election (meaning, incidentally, that Gerald Ford had operated as both the VP and President of the United States without ever once being elected to either position!) I therefore couldn't help but wonder: what manner of heat could there really have been around the matter of the ex-president giving a series of interviews to a British TV personality known mostly for puff pieces?

And, in fact, that's exactly the question that Ron Howard's film sets out to answer, in an amazingly-entertaining fashion. We see that David Frost had a terrible time drumming up any interest from advertisers or the American TV networks, to the point where he had to self-finance it with some help from his friends. While Nixon himself drooled at the six-figure payment that he would get out of it, virtually no one outside of Frost's inner circle was enthusiastic in the least about the project. Ford had declared the U.S.'s "long national nightmare" to be over when he took office, and Carter had actually made that a reality when he whisked Nixon's pardoner out the door. So naturally the only people who wanted to ever see Nixon's face again hoped that it would come to them from behind bars (which Ford's "stay out of jail for free" card had precluded) or in some frank admission of guilt. And what were the chances that a lightweight like Frost could ever get that out of Tricky Dick?

I found Frost/Nixon to be a thrilling trip back through time, filled to the brim with reminders of just what our part of the world was like in the 1970s. It also provides a great deal of suspense - some of that muted, unfortunately, by the decision to show what is undoubtedly the film's key emotional turning point in just about every talk show appearance made on behalf of the movie - as well as standout performances by Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in the two title roles. Langella, in particular, absolutely inhabits the former president in every way: voice, demeanour, body language and presence. Despite not really looking all that much like Nixon, I caught myself several times having to look for clues that it wasn't archival footage that had suddenly been spliced in.

If you're a history buff at all, then I think that you'll love Frost/Nixon as much as I did. But for those who prefer a faster pace and lighter fare in your entertainment, I imagine that this one may not be your cup of tea. It is, after all, very tightly focused on one specific moment in history: two men, each attempting to rejuvenate his career at the expense of the other. It's quite the intense battle, but at no point does a gun get fired or any bombs go off. And yet I still couldn't take my eyes off the screen!

Rating: ****