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Frost/Nixon: A Presidential Reckoning

by Eli Sanders

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Frost/Nixon
dir. Ron Howard

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I know people have strong feelings about this, so I should say at the outset that I never saw Frost/Nixon the play. Make of that what you will. But I liked Frost/Nixon, the movie, very much. (So did the person I saw the movie with, and he had seen the play. Take that, play purists.)

The main characters in the film, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) and David Frost (Michael Sheen), are played by the same actors who played them onstage when Frost/Nixon first opened in London. My friend, who'd seen a production in New York, thought Langella and Sheen did a good job of adapting their onstage roles to the very different realm of close-ups and cutaway shots. I enjoyed how completely the actors seemed to inhabit their parts, no doubt owing to how much time they've now spent in them. Langella is a lumbering, gravelly-voiced, pathological-yet-brilliant Nixon, and he plays the former president with a generous amount of sympathy. Sheen shows us a pathologically feckless, but perfectly clutch, Frost. His voyage forms the heart of the narrative, an intellectual hero's journey that takes Frost from semiserious playboy talk-show host to ex- president slayer in a matter of 122 minutes.

It's compelling to watch because of how much was at stake then, with much of the American public desperate for the trial and conviction that the presidentially pardoned Nixon had managed to avoid (until he agreed to take $600,000 for a interview with Frost). It's also compelling for the resonance with this particular moment: a publicly unrepentant president, cloistered and clearly troubled by the mistakes he's made, grappling with whether to stonewall any and all attempts at a public reckoning.

The final scenes will be familiar to politically conscious people of a certain era, and to anyone who's spent a decent amount of time on YouTube (where you can watch parts of the original Frost-Nixon interviews). During the Frost/Nixon screening that I watched, a woman seated nearby recited the climactic bits of Nixon's dialogue along with Langella, including the famous line: "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." I understood. Across time and medium, it still blows your mind.