Frost/Nixon
Ron Howard (2008)
Shallowly tendentious and tiresome, this is another in Peter Morgan’s series of power struggles involving big political, royal and/or other celebrities. Following The Deal, The Queen and his adaptations of The Last King of Scotland and The Other Boleyn Girl, it’s the only piece of screen Morgan (so far) that began life as a stage play, and it shows. Although the use of words is an important part of the material, the screenplay is overwritten in its invented sequences – ie when it’s not using the transcripts of the David Frost-Richard Nixon television interviews. A scene such as Nixon’s drunken phone call to Frost shortly before the recording of their final interview may be compelling to watch happening on two sides of a stage (especially a small stage like the Donmar Warehouse, where the play began life in London). On screen, it’s exposed as a character-revealing device of clumsy artificiality. The first 45 minutes or so – describing preparations for the interviews, which took place some two and a half years after Nixon’s resignation – seem to be filler, and perfunctory filler at that. Even when the interviews get under way, the film is still marking time until we reach the last of the (four) recording sessions – the one in which Nixon is manoeuvred by Frost into making the statement ‘I’m saying that if the President does it, it’s not illegal’, admitting that he was part of the Watergate cover-up and acknowledging that he betrayed the office of President, the American people and the US system of executive government. I don’t know whether the protagonists prepared for this last interview in the sporting contest terms suggested – a final showdown between a political heavyweight and a media creature whose fighting weight is arguable (and which is supposed to be part of the suspense). You might think that, if they had done so in the explicit, ‘no holds barred’ terms presented here, Nixon would have been all the more inclined to stonewall (more so than if, say, Frost had lulled him into a false sense of security). Whatever actually happened, the film of Frost/Nixon is truly negligible without this last confrontation.
There’s only one character of interest in the picture and that is Richard Nixon: it’s hard to care whether the interviews will give David Frost the impetus that his faltering TV career is shown to need. Yet Peter Morgan doesn’t seem too interested even in Nixon: Morgan adds only slightly to our negative opinions of a publicly disgraced figure, by showing him as grubbily mercenary. In his phone call, Nixon tells Frost they’re two of a kind, bound to be despised for ever – by a largely unexplained ‘them’ – because of their humble origins and in spite of their success; beyond this, Morgan doesn’t really get into Nixon’s legendary paranoia or suggest its morally corrosive effects. I found myself resisting the film’s smug condemnation of Nixon and the matching reactions heard in the audience I was part of. The hoots of self-congratulatory laughter each time Nixon said something to expose himself as a bad lot made me feel sorry for the man. Morgan seems to twist the knife in exactly the way that Nixon rails at his opponents for doing in 1974 – with the difference that it’s relatively easy for a writer to do it 30 years later. Perhaps Morgan isn’t interested in Nixon except as a generic figure – A Corrupt Politician (I suspect that feeling caused some of the laughter in the audience).
Frank Langella’s stage performance as Nixon was much honoured and I can see how it might have been a lot more successful in the theatre than it is here. Nixon was notoriously uncomfortable on TV: he bitterly reminds Frost that radio listeners to the 1960 presidential debate with Kennedy, deprived of the sight of the mark-of-Cain perspiration on Nixon’s upper lip, thought that the Republican candidate had won the debate. In theory (although I know nothing about the Donmar or Broadway productions), an actor playing Nixon in the theatre can be powerful without convincing the audience that the man he’s playing would be good in front of a camera. It’s crucially different in a film. Frank Langella is self-evidently good on camera and, when we see Nixon looking shifty, we’re watching Langella successfully expressing that quality through the camera; it puts Nixon’s discomfort in inverted commas. This might seem to be an insuperable problem in casting the part but it’s made worse by the fact that this particular actor’s effects, although skilful, are essentially theatrical (someone like Gene Hackman – although now probably too old for the role – might have been a very different matter). Langella is wrong in other ways too. Nixon was a gift to cartoonists; as Sally said, the shape of his nose (suggesting Pinocchio’s swarthy elder brother), his five-o’-clock-shadowed jowels and his receding hairline all gave him the look of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Instead of the profoundly unattractive Nixon, we get in Langella an aging but still handsome man. In his exchanges with Frost’s girlfriend Caroline Cushing, this Nixon seems to be a somewhat charming old rogue – not particularly creepy. For much of the time, Langella sounds as if he’s putting on the growly voice (which has an actorly, orotund tone); he seems to connect fully with it only when Nixon is shouting. In spite of all this, Langella is the only good reason to see the film; he does at least show sympathy for Nixon that’s absent from the writing.
The definition and treatment of Nixon are, if nothing else, clear. What’s consistent in the presentation of Frost is that he’s seen as preferable to Nixon but that’s as far as the consistency goes. Sometimes Frost’s quest is treated as more or less heroic, seeking-after-truth journalism; at other times, Frost is shown as an energetic egomaniac, in a way that conforms to liberal, educated perceptions of Frost – in Britain at least. Morgan, who seems very aware of the likely audience for his work, deprives Frost of any substantial qualities (except an aptitude for hard work). In the build-up to the interviews, he’s relentlessly dismissed as a talk show lightweight by the American media – and there’s no indication why John Birt (almost universally regarded, at that time, as a serious figure in political television – through his work on World In Action and Weekend World), rates him highly. Yet for those who can remember – and for the many more of us who’ve seen replayed clips from – Frost’s surgical taking apart of the insurance fraudster Emil Savundra (in one of Frost’s early shows for Rediffusion, after he left the BBC in 1967), his culminating performance against Nixon comes as no great surprise. When Frost first meets Caroline on a transatlantic flight (a ropy and primitive piece of writing), she quotes a recent published description of Frost as one of the men of the age (along with Vidal Sassoon) but as having ‘no discernible quality whatsoever’. A wittier and more cryptic remark (not used here), attributed to Kitty Muggeridge, was that Frost ‘rose without trace’. Having done so, he’s shown an uncanny ability to adapt himself to changing fashions in order to sustain his celebrity and success. Peter Morgan may be right that Frost, as a man, is uninteresting but he is some kind of a phenomenon: what’s the point of making him into a major element of the story if you don’t think he’s of any interest at all? Answer: as an indispensable stick to beat Nixon with.
In The Queen, Michael Sheen gave a performance as Tony Blair that was a good deal better than Morgan deserved (or perhaps wanted). There are moments in Frost/Nixon when Sheen suggests he’s trying to achieve a similar blend of caricature and humanisation but they’re only moments – and, unlike in The Queen, he has more screen time than the other half of the celebrity duo. Sheen gets a convincing distinction between Frost’s mannerisms on and off camera but he’s too often caught with a desperate fixed grin; and the facial reactions to breakthrough moments in the interviews with Nixon make no sense, given that Frost is evidently highly aware of what the camera will be picking up. It may have been against his instincts as an actor to keep Frost opaque – to interpret him as a whirring, unaccountable organism rather than a person – but I think Sheen would have done better not to try to humanise Frost. The scope for doing so just isn’t there in the script and Sheen sometimes suggests an anxiety and self-consciousness that don’t connect with the widespread preconception of what Frost is like. Sheen has a remarkable gift for vocal and facial impersonation but he’s too good a character actor (as he showed in, say, The Four Feathers) to plough this furrow for much longer.
The casting of Matthew Mcfadyen as John Birt is a bizarre missed opportunity. Given the real Birt’s vocal and facial eccentricities, it might have been fun to have an actor who looked like Frost’s unsmooth twin – a kindred spirit but one who needed to be the power behind the camera rather than in front of it. Mcfadyen is becoming a rather colourless actor: he looks here like a very gently satirical idea of a vaguely arty intellectual, vacuously handsome – no characterisation at all. It would have been more fun if the inescapably odd Toby Jones, who has the much smaller part of Swifty Lazar, had played Birt. Rebecca Hall is pleasantly assured in the non-part of Caroline Cushing. Sam Rockwell is James Reston Jr, one of the investigators hired by Frost for the occasion and who turns up gold dust in the form of a transcript of an exchange between Nixon and Charles Colson. Reston is passionately hostile to Nixon, for ideological reasons that extend beyond Watergate; Rockwell is asked to do political earnestness sometimes straight and sometimes satirically – and slightly overdoes it in both departments. Oliver Platt is more likeable as the other investigator, Bob Zelnick. In the role of Nixon’s tensely loyal henchman Jack Brennan, Kevin Bacon shows some integrity, even empathy with the man he’s playing, but it’s a pointless exercise, given how the part has been conceived. There are sequences where older versions of some of the characters – Birt, Cushing, Reston, Brennan – recollect the preparations for the 1977 interviews; in these sequences, Brennan is smiling and relaxed, puzzlingly so until he eventually reveals that he didn’t watch the Frost-Nixon exchanges. This gets a laugh, of course, but it’s counterproductive; it makes you realise that a man as thoroughly in denial as Brennan would never have agreed to give an interview commemorating the interviews. It’s another reminder, as if one were needed, of the falsity and superficiality of Peter Morgan’s approach.
I’ve kept referring to Morgan rather than to the director for a reason. This is Morgan’s piece and Ron Howard seems to have merely executed it for the screen: his direction has, to coin a phrase, no discernible quality whatsoever. Except that his use of a news film prologue to guide us into the story is powerful; perhaps accidentally so, because the images and voices of the real cast of Watergate – Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, Mitchell – have a weight with which nothing that follows can compare. Nixon’s resignation as President was a major and traumatic event in American political history. Frost/Nixon is trivial. I wouldn’t mind it if Peter Morgan and Ron Howard seemed to be revelling in their triviality but their jocose sarcasm is both mean-spirited and heavy-spirited. The worst thing about the picture is that many people will feel that it’s ‘thought-provoking’ for no better reason than that it exploits serious material (exploits in both senses of the word). The laughter stops when David Frost asks Richard Nixon during one interview to watch newsreel footage of atrocities in Cambodia; in order to present any real challenge to their audience, the film would need at this point to have us not only feeling hostile towards the President who authorised US incursions into Cambodia as a move against the North Vietnamese but also questioning the ethics of the programme-makers who use this kind of material to throw Nixon. I’m sure most people seeing this sequence will think badly only of Nixon – that seems to be what Morgan and Howard want, and what they know the audience wants too. It’s because Frost/Nixon manages to be trivial, pompous and calculating that’s it’s such a pain to sit through.
26 January 2009