NIXON, THE ARCHETYPAL VILLAIN
For my generation, Richard Nixon is the moral equivalent of a bad traffic accident. We stare into the bloody mess looking for entrails and oracles, hoping against all reason for final answers to the obvious but unproven crimes and violations of Nixon’s imperial presidency. We loved to hate this man, and many of us (veiled disclosure) still do. His oddly tormented body language and clownish face perpetually in 5 o’clock shadow, his artificial gravitas, all added up a savage caricature of responsible adult behavior, better even than Dan Akyrod’s riff. Somehow Tricky Dick seemed to invite us to use him as a tackling dummy to bash the validity and import our own parents’ values. To his credit, he could take the hit, this grotesque love child of the American rags to riches story that we were all force fed as kids. In dissecting the American Dream as college students, and exposing the places where there was no living flesh on the bone, Nixon was our unwitting whetstone and inspiration. We could always count on him for that.
A NEW TAKE ON TRICKY DICK
Frost/Nixon connects all these dots, faithful to the workmanlike approach of its first incarnation as a New York City stage play. The film chronicles the famous series of four interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, three years after he resigned the presidency in a cloud of suspicion and shame. For Frost, a glib talk show host recently exiled to Australia after his NY show tanked, it was his ticket to a huge audience and a shot at returning to the big time. For Nixon, exiled to his California compound after his disgrace, it was a chance to redeem his presidency by showcasing his many legitimate achievements such as initiating nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviet Union and opening diplomatic relations with China.
HOW IT GOES
Screen (and play) writer Peter Morgan lays the tale out as a kind of prize fight with the two combatants and their entourage discussing strategy, doing pre-event workouts and rooting their guy on from separate green rooms during the videotaping, suffering body blows when he does. This narrative spine is judiciously intercut with mocdoc interviews with the supporting players on both sides, Kevin Bacon is Nixon’s corner man and Oliver Platt is Frost’s political conscience. They both do a good job in these small supporting roles.
THE PLAYERS
Frank Langella portrays Nixon as a man with a sly playfulness and a baleful inferiority complex. Like Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Langella performs the impossible feat of making me feel some compassion for Tricky Dick - - and for this I will never forgive either one of them, or Peter Morgan. I've forgiven Oliver Stone because I know he hated Nixon as much as anyone and his film's portrait of Nixon the little man walking in very big shoes seemed revelatory and transcendent, a spiritual breakthrough. Gotta love that.
Frost, as played by Michael Sheen, is the archetypal facile, telegenic showman. Tony Blair on steroids. Frost, unlike Blair, is entirely about the buzz. He has so little interest in the content of interviews, or Nixon’s agenda to redeem himself through them, that he does not even discuss the issues with the aides he’s hired explicitly for that purpose. Nixon, of course, knows exactly what he wants to achieve and where Frost is vulnerable. In the first interview Frost naively gives Nixon far more latitude than he should and quickly loses control of the show. Sheen doesn't do passive very convincingly in these scenes. The movie loses credibility traction here but we certainly get the point.
The tussle for air time slowly works itself out in subsequent interviews, with Frost at last rising to the intellectual and moral challenge of confronting Nixon about his role in Watergate. I haven't watched the actual interviews for 30 years, and am curious how much Peter Morgan based his play on the actual play-by-play.
There’s a fine dramatic moment near the end of the film in which Nixon, driven by Frost’s now relentless, impassioned questioning, is teetering on the brink of disclosure. Langella gets the posture just right, the shoulder hunched, the head alert and held high at an awkward angle, the mouth and eyes a stream of nuances from pride to utter desolation. This alone was worth the ticket, truly amazing work (but not Oscar material in my opinion).
STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Seems to me that Nixon’s abuse of power and trampling of legality (“If the president does it," he apparently once said, "it’s legal.”) is the mother of all subsequent extra-legal shenanigans like Regan's Iran-Contra scams and the Bush gang’s cynically manipulating our country into an unnecessary war. This is not to mention the covert engineering of the current financial meltdown, of course, which will prove to be the longest lasting legacy of the reign of the barbarian kings -- and the most damaging. For this checks and balances-destroying trend over the last 40 years, we can thank Richard Nixon.
MEA CULPA
I came to this film hoping to expiate the various demons I associate with Tricky Dick. But the film didn’t deliver anything like that (just as Oliver Stone’s W. didn’t deliver a catharsis about George Bush either). While Langella’s Nixon has a few moments where the castle walls crumble and he reveals some degree of pain and shame for his illegal acts, it doesn’t satisfy the need I still feel for justice and accountability. We needed that from the Nixon team in order to restore the checks and balances of our system of government. What we got was a simulacrum, not the clear, crisp corrective that was needed. As a result, the problem continued to spiral out of control until we get to the Bush administration, which did things in the name of executive privilege that might even have troubled Nixon.
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