Frost/Nixon - Review

Director: Ron Howard
Writer: Peter Morgan
Starring: Frank Langella/Michael Sheen
Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes

I had to be careful when watching this movie. I knew going in that I probably wouldn't like it very much because I don't like journalists. If you've read any of my blogs on Big Media, then you know that I see them as hypocritical, arrogant asses.

Frost/Nixon confirmed my view of journalists, and reaffirmed that Hollywood believes that journalists are moral saints. In Hollywood, a journalist is the ultimate hero, as long as they are covering a story about a right wing politician. If the hero-journalist is blitzing a left-wing politician...wait. Sorry. There's never been a movie like that.

Frost/Nixon (notice which name comes first) is about British talk show host David Frost and his interviews with Richard Nixon. After Nixon resigns in August, 1974, Frost gets it in his head that interviewing Nixon will be good for his career, and will generate a lot of money. During preparation for the interviews, he hires a couple of researchers whose goal it is to get Nixon to admit criminal culpability for Watergate, and give an apology to the nation. Both of the researchers despise Nixon, and one of them believes the man is evil incarnate.

The conflict in the film comes not so much from the debate between Frost and Nixon, as it does Frost's pursuit of money to get the thing on the air. None of the networks wanted the interviews, and Frost had to pony up over half-a-million dollars for Nixon to take part. The first two hundred grand come from Frost's own pocket. Reality tells us that Frost would eventually get the interviews aired, and they would propel Frost to the heights of fame.

Or did they?

I say that because to my mind, the Frost/Nixon interviews are not well remembered. I don't have any proof of this beyond talking to a few old timers, but it did take a lot of prodding for them to a) remember who David Frost was (they thought he was the guy that hosted Masterpiece Theatre) and b) that he interviewed Nixon. So yes, I suppose the Nixon interviews made Frost famous in his day, but those hours of talking to Tricky Dick do not measure up posterity-wise to Walter Cronkite's one statement that the US could not win the Vietnam War.

But that's Hollywood. If a "journalist" grills a corrupt politician, the results must have been terribly important. Right?

Except Frost doesn't "grill" Nixon. In the film, as in life, you're treated to an expose of how utterly boring the interviews were. On Vietnam, on foreign policy, on protesters in the street, it's a lot of blah-blah-blah from Nixon, and a lot of short, general questions from Frost. In the movie, we watch as Frost's handlers berate him for being soft on Nixon, then witness him march into the living room and continue to be soft on Nixon. This goes round and round until the climactic moment when Nixon kinda-sorta says he's sorry, but never says the word "sorry" or "apologize." The protagonists take this as a stunning victory.

Though my outlook on the film may be slightly tainted by my view of journalists and their conceit, let me defend myself by saying that this is a pretty tepid film from a storyteller's point of view. After watching the film, I asked someone if they now knew what Watergate was all about. They said no. They had to. The film does not explain Watergate, or Nixon's involvement in it. There is no backstory. Anyone under the age of 50 will come away from the film not knowing what happened at the Watergate Hotel, or why Nixon resigned over it. They will only know that Nixon had to apologize for...something.

The political bent of the filmmakers is pretty apparent here. Nixon's character is very one-dimensional. He is evil, and that's that. Director Ron Howard depicts him as a pervert, a warmonger, a racist, a sexist, a senile drunk, a congenital liar, a megalomaniac, and a buffoon. Howard's Nixon is a pathetic person, paranoid and decrepit. There is no other side to him, and certainly no redemption. Howard and the characters in the film do not believe Nixon deserves any. It is Good Guys vs. Demented Creep.

Okay, fine, but only if the film allows that Nixon was a human being with a story of his own. We never get to see it, and so there is no drama. This film was made as a hatchet job on Nixon, and a glorification of Frost's boring interviews. The "abuse of power" theme is probably a jab at George W. Bush (Howard admitted as much in an interview, and it's probably the main reason this film got made), and the film revels in Nixon's personal and political demise. In its way, Frost/Nixon is a vindictive, arrogant piece of work. One image that struck me in the film was Nixon walking away from the last interview, beaten, while champagne corks pop in the background and Frost looks at him like...what? I don't know, but it isn't pity or even joy. It's just, "Job done."

For the record, I think Nixon lied and lost the White House through his own actions. I think he deserved his fate. Yet Nixon was responsible for a lot of good in the United States, at a time when the country seemed to be falling apart. The film glosses over Kennedy and Johnson's responsibility for the Vietnam War, and pins it all on Nixon. He is again depicted as the warmonger and the liar, sending US boys off to the meat grinder, bombing Vietnamese civilians with impunity. I have a problem with that. One image I have of Nixon comes from one of his biographies. He's standing at a window at a presidential retreat. He's alone. The Vietnam War drones on. One of his aides hears him talking to himself. He's saying, "Damn you, Johnson. Damn you for doing this to me."

There's humanity and backstory there. Frost/Nixon ignores it completely. You could easily leave this film saying, "Nixon caused Vietnam, bombed civilians, then committed some sort of crime at a place called Watergate. I think. Anyway, he was bad. Sweats a lot, too."

That's the way Ron Howard remembers it, and that's all right, as long as he doesn't expect people to see this film as anything other than an didactic filmmaker playing with himself.

One last note: a thought that occurred to me many times throughout the film was that the whole exercise was a waste of time. All of the Frost/Nixon interviews can be found on YouTube for free, anytime you want to see them.