A Few Words About Frost/Nixon

I’m of the opinion that if there ever was a rationale to separate critical judgment from movie enjoyment, Ron Howard’s films are it.  I generally enjoy his movies — I thought The Da Vinci Code was a trash masterpiece — but I know they’re not great cinema.  Frost/Nixon didn’t change that pattern.  I enjoyed it, especially when Nixon (Frank Langella) sat down across from Frost (Michael Sheen), but that didn’t come half-way through the film.  Or at least that’s what it felt like, anyway.

That points to one of the major problems with the movie:  it insists on following Frost, his girlfriend (Rebecca Hall) and assorted managers and debate-preppers (Matthew McFayden, Oliver Platt and a tamped-down Sam Rockwell) as they variously party, try to get funding, and prepare for the interview.  The problem is, I didn’t really care about any of it, even though Platt is funny and Hall ravishing.  In fact, some of it actively annoyed me: Frost is a dilettante and a playboy who really doesn’t care about the subject of his interview.  I get it, now move on.

By the time the film got to the interview, I was ready (maybe that was the purpose of the prologue, I don’t know), and the interview didn’t disappoint.  It was tense and well-acted, especially by Langella who, if he doesn’t look like Nixon, at least embodied the spirit of him.   Or what Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (upon whose play the film is based) think is his spirit, or — and this is more troubling — what they want us to think is his spirit.

The interviews are presented in a way that makes it look like it was Frost’s sudden toughening up, his sudden resolve, that wrung the admissions out of Nixon.  To this end, they shoot and cut the interview so that it looks like Frost is totally at sea, completely out of his depth, and what’s more, like he doesn’t really care, at least at first.  But gradually, as Nixon outsmarts him at every turn, stonewalling one minute, answering with mounds of trivia the next, it begins to sink into him the magnitude of his defeat.  Finally, on the night after the penultimate interview session, he remains dejected in his hotel, to depressed even to go out (we are led to believe for the first time since the interviews began, he’s such a playboy).  Suddenly the phone rings, and it’s a drunken Nixon, who rambles along, comparing himself to Frost — we’re the same, he says — and it infuses Frost with a pair all of a sudden, and he hangs up the phone, determined — as God is my witness — to nail the S.O.B.

Which he does: he bears down and takes it seriously for the very first time, he reads his notes, he quits partying till all hours with his hot girlfriend, and in that last Session — at the last minute — it’s his dogged interview style and relentless questioning that wrings the historic apology out of the sweating ex-president.

Problem is, almost none of it really happened.  In an article written last month for the Daily Mail, Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken disputes most of the film’s version of the debates, beginning with the turning point:  there was almost certainly no late-night, drunken phone call.  That device — which certainly smelled of artifice when I saw it onscreen — was cooked up by the filmmakers, apparently to juice up the suspense and better delineate the supposed victory of a good — if shallow — newsman over a disgraced president.  In fact, the decision to have Nixon apologize was made by his staff, after the twenty-four hours of the contractually agreed-upon interviews had taken place.  During the actual interviews, Nixon never gave an inch.  He was the consummate stonewaller, after all.

His staff realized that was a problem: one of the reasons for the debates — other than money — was rehabilitation.  And if nothing was changed after the interviews, there would be almost certainly none of that.  People would see an unrepentant, unchanged ex-President, they would see that he was the same old Tricky Dick, after all.  And so his staff granted Frost a thirteenth interview session, and set about carefully crafting an apology that admitted no wrong-doing.

You might be saying to yourself: so what’s the difference?  It’s hardly unknown for Hollywood to fluff the details, to make the crooked paths straight and grease the wheels of simplicity with a little good old fashioned storytelling.  What’s the damage?  After all, Frost did interview him, he did express his regrets and apologize for what he’d put the American people through.  What’s the big deal?

Well, first of all, it’s history, and recent history, at that.  We’re dealing with people who are still alive who were there, what happened is hardly a matter of conjecture.  The filmmakers could have gotten it right, but they chose to tell it wrong.  There seems to have been an agenda at work that refused to recognize that the apology originated in the Nixon camp.  The building up of Frost into a (reluctant) hero would have been blunted by showing that he didn’t wring the apology out of Nixon after all.  Howard and Morgan seem to have required that tired, old Hollywood stereotype: the hero who doesn’t start out that way, but who rises to the occasion in the end.

They carry it through to the end of the picture, refusing to recognize that Nixon was actually rehabilitated, to a certain extent, by this interview.  According to Aitken, he used the interview as a “springboard” to resurrect a career: he “emerged from the shadows of San Clemente and re-entered the spotlight of public life.”  If you believe the movie, Frost was the absolute winner and Nixon continued in limbo, old and broken and tired.

That is the pity of a film like Frost/Nixon: as competent as it is, as well-crafted as it turns out to be, it could have been more.  It could have explored the delicious irony that actually happened, that the interview both made Frost’s career and Nixon’s as well, in what Aitken calls a “win-win” situation.  Instead, Howard and company insist on pumping up the jam to give us one more black-and-white situation.  They seem not to realize that we’re big boys and girls, that we can handle a little complexity, a little un-tidiness, a little gray.  Frost/Nixon coulda’ been a contender.