Frost/Nixon

by Matthew Rodgers

If someone were to tell you that a movie based on a play that itself was adapted from a series of television interviews would result in one of the most exciting and climactically satisfying trips to cinema-land in ages, you might well ask them to check the straps on their straight jacket and sit them down in front of Mamma Mia on repeat.

In the summer of 1977, the televised interviews between David Frost (Michael Sheen – The Queen) and disgraced former President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella – Superman Returns) drew a combined audience of almost forty-five million viewers. Sparring over the course of four evenings the electric exchanges were the making of a man, and the breaking of another, and the closest thing the American public got to an apology. Director Ron Howard brings Peter Morgan’s stage play to the bring screen using the original stage actors to portray the days leading up to this historic event, the furore surrounding it, and the legacy that it left behind.

Easily Ron Howard’s most mature film, knowing that he can crank up the tension with Apollo 13 on his CV, it’s the deft touch with which he caresses the pace of the film towards the barbed exchanges that surprises. Frost/Nixon is constructed much like a sports movie, depicting the turmoil in each camp during the build-up to the fight and then the blow-by-blow bout at the end, and it’s just as gripping as any Rocky fought.

In one corner is Sheen as Frost, not the distinguished Sunday morning stalwart we are familiar with, but a playboy presenter chancing his way towards ambition and gambling his reputation on an interview that he is ill-prepared for. It’s a role that emanates confidence and vulnerability in equal measures and to his credit Sheen evokes our sympathies with an initially irksome character. Langella on the other hand is monstrously chameleonic, tall and proud like the commander-in-chief he once was one minute, and hunchbacked and submissive the next, it’s a tremendous performance of scene-stealing gravitas that brings humanity to this most public felling of a beast.

Shot in a faux documentary style and asking the actors to employ the talking head technique can take a little getting used to but there is no denying that this is equally balanced as pure, thrilling entertainment and the kind of presidential examination that W should have been.