Frost/Nixon (2008) -

A meticulously conventional cinematic treatment of the stage play about the legendary interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon, in the year or three after Nixon stepped down from the Presidency. The film is basically effective. A solid cast, deliciously apt production design and a deft neo-documentary framing conceit to cover necessary expository bases. For example, the film uses archival footage to remind a presumably foggy/clueless audience of the particulars of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's subsequent ignominy. And, not unlike the prefatory use of archival footage in Van Sant's Milk, the device serves to amplify both the distance of this particular piece of recent history while also underscoring the affinity/continuity with contemporary political concerns. Both films, too, are delicious in their attention to the material culture, decorations and fashions of their mid1970s moments. Yet the two films could not be more different in their emotional immediacy. Where I found Milk to be startlingly open-hearted, Frost/Nixon is blithely mechanical, even glib in its treatment of this moment in U.S. history which, arguably, tore more people up in more profound ways than the fact of Harvey Milk's brief political career. Howard's direction is both assiduously clinical and patently obvious, which helps us in some ways never to get lost in the fracas of facts, conjectures, and giant egos. Yet Howard's accommodation of the (presumably) easily confused viewer also, perhaps inadvertently, removes the threat/delight of discovery. Early on, we know pretty much for sure that Howard won't let us miss any important detail -- he'll let a character offer the detail in an aside, then his camera will fix on a visual articulation of the central detail and (most likely) we'll get an interstitial talking head moment to explain that detail's significance. While this strategy amplifies the clarity of the intellectual machinations that make up the narrative's action, it also removes the tension. As such the film becomes uniformly interesting/fascinating but almost never affecting. The other part of the film I found curiously hollow was Howard's choice to discover the narrative's urgency in the ostensible drama of the genre of an artist building his opus. (Here, the interview is Frost's masterwork and much of the narrative's tension is derived from the historically obviated question: "will he be able to pull it off?" Again to draw a Milk comparison: it would be as if the film tried to make drama out of the question of whether or not Dan White would actually kill Milk and Moscone. In both films, this historical event -- the assassination of Milk; the phenomenal impact of the Frost-Nixon interviews -- is the whole point of the story. So I remain astounded that Howard made the weird choice to squeeze narrative tension from such a conspicuously false "mystery.") And while I found the idea that Nixon was a blackout drinker with an alcoholic's distorted ego/priorities, I found the "insight" into his character less than compelling. The performances are generally first-rate. Michael Sheen is once again captivating in what could have easily been a historical caricature. Oliver Platt, Matthew MacFayden, Toby Ross and Kevin Bacon are vivid and entertaining. Rebecca Hall looks like a movie star and invests her peculiarly empathetic screen presence generously within an appallingly unwritten role. Only Frank Langella, in the showcase role of the piece, is distracting. Admirable enough, I suppose -- but I always saw Langella, never Nixon. A deft, conventional, and (ultimately) glib telling of an often fascinating story.