Frost/Nixon
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Movie Reviews of Frost/Nixon
Movie Review: Frost / Nixon DVD
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellant movie. Very good price, quick delievery. What more can
you ask for ?
Movie Review: Great piece of history.
Summary: 5 Stars
Loved the well acted script. It is always great when they get history right.Movie Review: "I shall be your fiercest adversary/I shall come at you with everything I've got....the limelight can only shine on one of us"
Summary: 4 Stars
"Frost/Nixon is a riveting historical drama, based on the play by Peter Morgan. Morgan wrote the movie's screenplay, as well as screenplays for "The Queen," and "The Last King of Scotland." The controversial 1977 Frost/Nixon interviews are dramatized here, and Frank Langella's superb performance as the disgraced former president, Richard M. Nixon, is worth the price of a movie rental alone.
Richard Nixon resigned from the office of the presidency on August 9, 1974, rather than face impeachment by Congress for his role in the Watergate scandal, and subsequent events. He was the only US president ever to do so. The film shows real footage of the Nixon family, leaving the White House and boarding a helicopter - the first step in a journey which will take Mr. Nixon into exile.
David Frost, (Michael Sheen), a British celebrity talk show host, watches this event on television and decides that an interview with Nixon would be just the thing to relaunch his waning career. He pursues the project for some time and winds up financing it out of his own pocket, while searching desperately for backers. Creepy literary agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, (Toby Jones), negotiates the deal. Nixon agrees to do more than 20 hours of on-camera interviews with Frost, and will receive $1 million or more in fees and profits for the sessions. He is in serious debt. He has huge legal bills and back taxes to pay and needs the money. Under the terms of the contract, Nixon will have no control over content of questions or editing, and will not see any of the questions in advance. Of course, he can always refuse to answer questions, but he will have to do so in front of a huge audience.
Frost is a most incongruous choice for interviewer, as he has no journalistic experience and is known for being an entertainer and playboy. Yet he manages to upstage major TV networks with their top-notch interviewers, like Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley, and get the gig. Nixon, after almost three years of silence, out of the public eye at his home in California, looks to the series of interviews as an opportunity to vindicate himself and resurrect his very tarnished image. He believes that Frost, a lightweight, will not ask the tough questions, and allow him to forward his own version of his time in office and Watergate.
Frost brings British John Birt, (Matthew Macfadyen), with him to California, to direct the production. They hire radical researcher James Reston, Jr., (Sam Rockwell), who wants Frost to play hardball and try Nixon in the public eye. TV producer Bob Zelnick, (Oliver Platt), signs onto the project also. Caroline Cushing, (Rebecca Hall), Frost's gorgeous girlfriend, accompanies the team. Nixon takes note of her beauty on several occasions. He rattles Frost, before the beginning of one session, by asking if "he had done any fornicating" the night before. I have never known anyone else who is capable of using such terrible language, frequently, and remain in a formal stance while doing so. However you look at him, RMN is a very formal man...he never looks relaxed - in real life or as played by Mr. Langella.
Nixon has his own team. US Marine officer Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), a Vietnam veteran, is Nixon's most loyal fan, and Diane Sawyer, (Kate Jennings Grant), is a consultant and assistant. Nixon tells Frost at the get-go, "I shall be your fiercest adversary. I shall come at you with everything I've got. Because the limelight can only shine on one of us."
Ultimately, forty-four million viewers turned-out to watch Richard Nixon go head-to-head with David Frost, about a third of the U.S. viewing public at the time. Director Ron Howard brings the tension and drama of this event to the screen...and then some. He focuses more on the psychological aspects of the characters rather than on the politics involved - to great effect. Howard explores each man's insecurities and the enormity of their egos. He really captures the intensity of the interview sessions, including shots of Nixon mopping perspiration from his upper lip with a handkerchief.
I was somewhat disturbed by one scene, a contrived midnight telephone call that Nixon, who had been drinking, makes to Frost. As so much of this film is accurate, or mostly accurate, the insert of a purely fictional event, is powerful but misleading. Mr. Howard took dramatic license too far in this instance.
Again, Mr. Langella's portrayal of Richard Nixon is stellar. Two monologues, in particular, stand out as exceptional. The final interview scenes, with close-ups of Mr. Nixon's/Langella's face, of his thoughtful, almost poignant expressions are phenomenal as he admits that he, "let the American people down."
This is a film which brings much depth to the event which it portrays, and to the characters involved. As a baby boomer, who clearly remembers Watergate, and the events surrounding it, I was riveted to the screen. Highly recommended.
Jana Perskie
Movie Review: Hollywood's Frost/Nixon Interviews- Parental Guidance Still Advised
Summary: 4 Stars
The following is from my review of the original (real) Frost/Nixon interviews. With the addition of a kudo for the fine performance of Frank Langella and a nod to the good sense of dramatic timing in the Hollywood version my points on the original intereviwes stand.
"The Original Frost/Nixon Watergate Interviews- Parental Guidance Advised
Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interview, David Frost, Richard Milhous Nixon, 1977
Apparently some things will not remain in the bottle. That appears to be the case with one Richard Milhous Nixon, one time President of the United States, certified demon and off-handedly a common criminal. Just when you though it was safe to go outdoors to get a little fresh air here he rises again to scare the bejesus out of another generation of idealistic young people and send his old time political opponents, including this reviewer, screaming in the night. What has brought on the fear?
Well, for one the recent notoriety around the movie "Frost/Nixon", the "story" behind the celebrated attempt by Nixon to `help' rewrite the second draft of history on his presidency and for Frost to leap-frog to the front of the journalist pantheon. That is what I thought I had bargained for when I ordered up what I assumed was a copy of the movie. What I got was far, far worst, a copy of the original Watergate segments of the original Frost/Nixon television interviews from 1977. I will, eventually, after my pulse returns to normal, get a copy of the movie and review that in this space but for now I will make a few comments on this little documentary gem.
As fate would have it I have recently been reading (or rather re-re-reading) "Dr. Gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson's compilation volume entitled "The Great Shark Hunt". Included in the selections were a series of articles that Thompson did for "Rolling Stone" magazine from his "mythical" National Affairs Desk at the time of the Nixon-era Watergate hearings in 1974. Thompson, not afraid to deride Nixon when he was riding high was more than willing to skewer him on his way down. To give a flavor of the times, of Thompson's appreciation of what the name Nixon meant to our generation and the importance of exposing that little crook to the clear light of day (something that, unfortunately, never really happened as he ran down some rat hole) I am reposting the concluding paragraph from a review I did of his "Songs Of The Doomed" in 2006:
"As a member of the generation of 1968 I would note that this was a period of particular importance which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States and all- around political chameleon. Thompson went way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when he was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick him when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon represented the `dark side' of the American spirit- the side that appears today as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary political hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson's work. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books."
And that last sentence kind of says it all. Probably from the minute that he resigned in disgrace in August 1974 Nixon began his little campaign to "rehabilitate" himself and move up in the presidential pecking order from dead last to at least beat the likes of James Buchanan and Millard Fillmore. He should not have bothered. His grilling by the well-prepared Frost (who had his own personal agenda in getting involved in this project) was as full of self-justifications, obfuscations, down right balderdash and melodramatic nonsense as one could take in an hour and one half presentation.
Even three years later he still didn't get it. The basic premise that Nixon and his staff worked under while president was that of the "divine right of kings" a theory discredited a couple of centuries ago. But why go on. Whether you want to view this little film as horror, humor or hubris do not, and I repeat do not, do it while you are depressed about the state of the world. As noted above- Be forewarned this film is not for the faint-hearted. Parental Guidance is very definitely suggested for all concerned."
Movie Review: Let's You and Him Fight
Summary: 4 Stars
This movie paints David Frost's interview of Richard Nixon as a verbal boxing match. In part, the interview no doubt did get framed that way - as a result of Nixon's own adversarial spirit, and as a result of the hopes many members of Frost's staff entertained of getting a breakthrough admission of guilt from Nixon in regard to Watergate. However Ron Howard, the Director of this film, said this combative aspect of the interview was enhanced in order to make the film more visually dynamic.
Some further poetic license is taken with Frost's reputation. The people ringing this debate are shown repeatedly dismissing Frost as a playboy Hollywood interviewer, as a lightweight unequal to the task of asking any hard-edged political questions, and particularly unequal to the task of getting Nixon to confess to wrong-doing. Again, Ron Howard says that Frost's reputation was skewed this way for the purposes of projecting his encounter with Nixon as a more arresting, more suspenseful "David" and Goliath contest.
In actuality, Frost has always had the reputation of being much more of an insightful interviewer. When he had his American interview show, people would chuckle a bit at his trademark question, "How would you define love?" However overall, it was usually recognized that his offbeat personal questions did end by producing a remarkably intimate, revealing portrait of his subjects. He has always been known as a good listener, as someone able to catch at any loose thread that a person might present. He would then put himself in a position to gently, sympathetically pull on that thread until he unraveled many of the mysteries of his subject's personality.
So in watching this movie, I found myself wishing that the interview had, both in reality and for the purposes of this dramatization, gotten framed less as war and more as exploration. I wondered what might have been elicited if Frost had not been pressured to abandon his usual avuncular style in favor of a hard-hitting, "nail him" approach. I would at some level have preferred that the movie could have been entitled - not Frost-slash-Nixon (Frost/Nixon) - but in a greater spirit of cooperation, Frost-hyphen-Nixon (Frost-Nixon).
For a moment, I thought perhaps such a wish was wrong-headed when I saw Frost elicit what became the advertising trailer for the film - Nixon declaring that when a President decrees something - "then it's NOT illegal." However in his commentary, Ron Howard revealed that this was perhaps the one place where the film strayed from the verbatim text of the interview. In actuality, Nixon made that telling remark in another interview, outside this adversarial series.
Whether you enjoy the blood sport slant given to these proceedings though, or whether you watch this film wondering what might have been revealed under less pressured circumstances - you're bound to be engaged and educated by this reenactment. Furthermore, Ron Howard's Director's commentary is serious, intelligent, and worthwhile.
The one disappointment connected with this DVD is the listing of the "real" interview among its bonus features. Actually, this feature includes only a few seconds of footage from the real interview. The rest of the feature is just another "The Making of Frost/Nixon." However, this film will probably pique your curiosity about the actual interviews and propel you to seek out that footage - so that you can judge for yourself how different inflections, editing, and context - might have recast this historic encounter.