Film review: Frost/Nixon

Director: Ron Howard.
With: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen.
Released: 9 January

In 2007, the Oscars for best actor and best actress went to people playing heads of state in fact-based dramas: Forest Whitaker was Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and Helen Mirren was Elizabeth II in The Queen. What's more unusual is that in both cases, the films were scripted by the same British writer, Peter Morgan. Now Morgan has turned his West End hit, Frost/Nixon, into a screenplay—and it's another fact-based drama featuring yet another real-life head of state.
Don't be surprised if Frank Langella, the actor who plays Richard Nixon, is the third of Morgan's stars to take home an Academy Award.

The Frost in Frost/Nixon is David Frost, as played by Michael Sheen (Tony Blair in The Queen). When the story opens in 1974, both he and Nixon have seen better days. The former president has been driven from the Oval Office by the Watergate scandal, and is about to begin his luxurious exile in California, far from the East Coast political nerve centre he loves. Frost, meanwhile, is hosting a tacky talk show in Australia, a kind of exile in itself after his glamorous reign as the transatlantic king of satire.

Sheen may play him as a glib, grinning cross between Blair and Alan Partridge, but he's also a shrewd operator. He knows that if he can secure a series of TV interviews with Nixon, he could regain his fame in America. For Frost, it's a gamble that might cost him the last of his reputation and the whole of his fortune. For his American researchers (played by Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt), the interviews are a chance to give Nixon the trial he never had. And for Nixon, the encounter could be the way to put his side of the story, and maybe even exonerate himself.

As the interview sessions approach, there are negotiations over fees and scrabbles for sponsorship, material which could have made for a dry, dull drama-documentary, but Frost/Nixon is more like a boxing movie, complete with weeks of training and tactics, and corner men coaching the fighters between rounds. It probably helps that Ron Howard, the director, made a genuine boxing film, Cinderella Man, in 2005.

He and Morgan have woven a tense, slyly witty David and Goliath clash, laced with contemporary parallels. But what stands out is Langella's complex portrayal of Nixon, once the world's most powerful man, now reduced to giving after-dinner speeches at orthodontists' conventions. He's haunted, crafty, sometimes monstrous, but oddly sympathetic. Thanks to Langella's Oscar-worthy impersonation, he almost makes you nostalgic for when a Republican ex-president could be so articulate.

Nicholas Barber