Frost: Are you really saying the President can do something illegal?To try to put yourself in the environment of Frost/Nixon, imagine it's 2010 and George W. Bush has decided to sit for his first post-Presidency interview as a twenty-plus hours exclusive taping with ... Carson Daly, or somewhere halfway between Ryan Seacrest and that guy who does the sex predator busts for Dateline.
Nixon: I'm saying that when the President does it, that means it's not illegal!
Frost: ...I'm sorry?
Because that's who David Frost was back in 1975 when he landed the interview -- a 36-year-old lightweight pseudo-journalist more comfortable with the Brothers Gibb than with hard news. But Frost had an idea -- secure disgraced former President Richard Nixon's first post-presidency interview as a means of boosting his credibility, and pay whatever he had to do to get it. After a small bidding war with NBC and other outlets, Nixon's price was $600,000 and 20% of the profits, and the interview was landed.
Other than general parameters that each of the four 90-minute segments to air would focus on a different aspect of the Nixon record (Watergate, foreign, domestic, personal), there were no restrictions on any of the questions Frost could ask. And while Frost thought he could make a name for himself, Nixon predicted he could school Frost, filibuster when necessary, and use these hours to rebuild his legacy.
As with many other films this season -- [insert spoiler discussion ALOTT5MA has read before] and, yes, whether anything interesting happened between Frost and Nixon.
(Hell, you can guess: tell me who'd want to see a movie about a Richard Nixon running circles around a naive playboy.)
So I don't know how much one can or should "spoil" about what happens in the movie, which sticks pretty well to the historical transcripts while on-set, to contemporaneous accounts of much of the rest, plus one /dilly/ of an invented phone call towards the end that is entertaining as hell, and tells at least screenwriter Peter Morgan's sense of the "truth" of Nixon, though anyone familiar with Rick Perlstein's exegesis of the Franklin/Orthogonian dichotomy will feel comfortable with it.
And it's entertaining as hell, in a way neatly parallels one of my modern favorites, Shattered Glass, the way you spend that whole film waiting for Chuck Lane to kick Anakin Skywalker's Paduan-lying ass from one end of the New Republic's offices to the other. As many have noted, the film is structured as an intellectual boxing match, and the talking-head interviews along the way (perhaps, too many) make you really appreciate the knockout blow.
The frustrating thing about Frost/Nixon, though, is that the climax to which it builds is, however dramatic, meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I spoil nothing to say that no matter what he says in the interview, Nixon doesn't go to jail, though he doesn't get rehabilitated, and that things worked out well for David Frost. So?
Well, it's still fun on its own terms, and Frank Langella (Nixon) and Michael Sheen (Frost) do own their characters well. More importantly, the film has one true insight that's worth remembering, and it's spoken by one of Frost's research assistants, James Reston Jr., played by Sam Rockwell:
You know, the first and greatest sin or deception of television is that it simplifies, it diminishes, Great, complex ideas, tranches of time. Whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. ... David had succeeded on that final day in getting, for a fleeting moment, what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get: Richard Nixon's face. Swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat, filling every television screen in the country. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist.Think about that claim for a second -- that we really see truth from public figures in those interstitial moments, the pauses, the ums, the you knows, the little unconscious, unforced gaps in the script that we believe provide insight into character. [Discussion of Gov. Palin omitted to adhere to the no-politics rule.]
But these reactions can also be deeply unfair -- think about the novice politician who says you know a lot just because he's not trained in being on television yet, the error that's just that, an error. Or, hell, Nixon himself, forever tarred with the sin of sweating during a televised 1960 debate because he was recovering from the flu, which folks took as proof of his untrustworthiness.
Okay, so they were right about Nixon. So in thinking about this question, let's do this: take a look at this two-minute clip from the actual interviews, and just watch Nixon's reaction as Frost is asking the question. Watch the unconscious way he seems to dread having to answer the question, the little gulps he takes. Does that tell you everything you need to know, regardless of what he says later?
The achievement of Frost/Nixon, and of the actors involved, is that you may not look at another political interview the same way ... or, perhaps, may finally recognize how you've been subconsciously watching them all along.
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