Tricky Dick

A disgraced president and a TV journalist trying to change his image go at it in Ron Howard's new film.

by Shaun Brady

FROSTED: Soft journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen, left) faces off against recently deposed President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella, right).

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Not a punch is thrown, but with Frost/Nixon Ron Howard has crafted a far more satisfying boxing picture than he managed a few years back with Cinderella Man. The structures are nearly identical: the scrappy underdog faced with a formidable opponent, the exhaustive training, the early setbacks followed by a comeback victory. There's even a training montage on the eve of the big fight — granted, it consists of rifling through files and late-night phone calls rather than gym workouts and running up the steps of local monuments, but the gist is the same.

Howard is a facile craftsman, at his best when he confines his attention to simple, pressurized situations. His stabs at gravitas or dramatic sweep inevitably stumble, weighed down by sentiment or cliché. Here, as in Apollo 13, he seems liberated by the fact that history has already revealed the outcome of the story, allowing him to concentrate on personalities under pressure.

The 1977 series of interviews between British chat-show host David Frost and Richard Nixon here becomes several rounds of mental pugilism. Frost suffers in the early rounds before managing a knockout punch just before the final bell, when he corners Nixon into professing some degree of contrition. Where Peter Morgan's play, which the film is based on, seems to place more cultural significance on the confrontation than it actually possessed — Nixon's "apology" is fascinating viewing but hardly provided any sort of national catharsis — Howard justly narrows his focus, confining its significance to the two men involved.

And while the film adds some meat to the supporting characters surrounding them, this is a two-man show. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their stage-tested (and, in Langella's case, Tony-winning) roles with obvious relish. Timeliness aside — and there is much in the debate over executive hubris that inevitably resonates — this is a glib sparring match helmed by a filmmaker with a gift for the glib.

Ever since the 1960 debates, the narrative on Nixon has been that of a sweating ogre unseated by his opponent's youth and good looks. But no politician in the 20th century, if ever, could hope to rise to the presidency without some measure of personal charm, and the best thing about Langella's performance is how he captures Nixon's uncanny magnetism. His eyes project an unnerving intensity, his inability to empathize coming off as personal interest when it's actually more akin to an alien studying some strange race of being.

The imposing Langella hardly resembles the smaller Nixon, but their physical dissimilarities are never distracting. In his bulk, the actor seems to portray Nixon's essence rather than his actual presence. Bloated by gall, hunched by paranoia and self-loathing, this is the picture of the president conjured by the mind's eye of the nation post-Watergate.

Sheen's Frost is all blow-dried charm, too-easy grin and hair distractions from the naked ambition behind the eyes. He's driven by a need to amplify his own prestige. Unlike his researchers, played by Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell as a crusading comedy team, Frost is not out to grill the ex-president for the historical record, but for his own glorification.

That self-absorption is a quality he shares with Nixon. The night before their final interview, the one slated to focus on Watergate, the film has a drunken Nixon phoning Frost's hotel room. He offers basic trash-talk from the super-villain handbook, the old "you and I are the same" gambit, and then prattles on about how both have overcome traumatic lower-class origins. The scene, wholly fictional, misses the point entirely; what they actually share is their ability to twist their shortcomings until they appear to be strengths, convincing themselves in the process.

While Nixon's confessions may provide a few knowing chuckles from an audience whose own current president will likely never find his way to even such meager self-awareness, it is, surprisingly, Frost's character who seems most relevant. His concern is landing the interview, not what it will reveal. But faced with the realization that anything short of a grilling will confirm people's perception of him as a breezy playboy, he's forced to shift tactics. Such an opportunity wouldn't be given to a journalist today. The Frosts of the world haven't learned how to corner politicians; the politicians have merely learned to be as callow as their hosts.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Frost/Nixon | Directed by Ron Howard | A Universal Pictures release | Opens Fri., Dec. 12 at Ritz Five