Howard’s blend

A great cast makes Ron Howard’s middlebrow political drama Frost/Nixon watchable

PRESIDENTIAL PURSUIT: Frank Langella and Michael Sheen

by MALCOLM FRASER

Ron Howard has had quite a varied career as a director, spanning everything from enjoyable fluff (Splash) to notorious bombs (Far and Away). Every so often, he creates the kind of middlebrow blockbuster that gets mainstream audiences and critics in a tizzy (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind). With his latest, Frost/Nixon, he seems to be gunning for acclaim, with a notch more artistic credibility to boot.

Adapted by Peter Morgan from his own award-winning play, it’s the true story of David Frost (Michael Sheen), a second-rate British TV personality who schemed and bought his way to an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) three years after Nixon’s resignation.

Sheen and Langella both reprise the roles they played onstage in London and on Broadway. Langella, whose portrayal won him the Tony Award for best actor, embodies the Nixon role thoroughly, nailing the disgraced president’s voice, body language and torment. Sheen (who played Tony Blair in The Queen) is equally convincing as Frost, portrayed here as a relatively apolitical hustler who’s mostly interested in shoring up his sketchy journalistic reputation.

A strong supporting cast fills out the bill. Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt are the beleaguered team who do Frost’s legwork while he schmoozes, Kevin Bacon turns in another solid, workmanlike performance as a Nixon aide, and Rebecca Hall plays Frost’s companion Caroline Cushing, whose role in the narrative as in the film seems to be mostly to hang around looking really good.

It’s a risky feat to build a whole movie around a two-man dialogue; Howard’s cast, not to mention his decades of Hollywood craftsmanship, come in handy. But ultimately, craftsmanship only goes so far. The meat of the themes and story are in the Frost-Nixon interview, and the film’s version of the events around the scoop come across as a limousine liberal’s wishful fantasy—a flaky entertainment personality holding a disgraced right-wing president accountable for his crimes. Plus, Howard uses the dreaded “fake interview” technique for exposition—a beyond-played-out trope that we can only hope will die of overexposure in 2009.

FROST/NIXON OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, DEC. 12