Frost/Nixon

In 1977, British TV presenter David Frost sat down for twelve hours of interviews with former President Richard Nixon. It was Nixon's first public interrogation since his resignation three years earlier. The interviews were a television sensation and remain a high point in the history of presidential journalism. Thirty years later, the interviews have lost a good deal of their pop culture relevance, raising the question of why anyone watching a movie in 2008 should care about them.

The task of making a little-remembered series of television interviews meaningful in the contemporary world falls to reliably mediocre director Ron Howard. He makes it work by keeping a tight focus on the two elements that defined the source material: Peter Morgan's Tony-winning play and the rich, lived-in performances of the two leads, who also starred together on Broadway. Frank Langella's Nixon is the best silver screen iteration of our bile-soaked 37th president since Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman's Secret Honor. Both of those performances channel Nixon's volcanic rage as well as his crippling insecurity. Langella deserves even more credit for taking the risk of imitating Nixon's gruff, iconic voice. Grounding a demanding role like this with an impersonation easily could have slipped into broad parody, but Langella's extreme focus and effortlessly authentic body language give his Nixon a powerful vitality. Michael Sheen is given the difficult task of making an impression opposite Langella as the somewhat more reserved, less operatically twisted David Frost. Sheen gets the job done by gently revealing layer after layer of the guarded personality of Frost, a glad-handing schmoozer and former comedian whose career depends on "nailing," in Stephen Colbert's words, Nixon on the issue of Watergate. The talk show host wears a boyish grin that hides his terror and status anxiety. As the interview preparations slowly go haywire and Nixon proves unflappable in the early going, Sheen's facade begins to crack.

With powerhouse actors and a witty, insightful script to work with, Ron Howard acquits himself nicely by staying out of the way, keeping his camerawork unobtrusive, blending docudrama and well-timed close-ups. He lets the material speak for itself, and it has some interesting things to say. Besides offering a subtle but penetrating evocation of Nixon's world-annihilating neuroses, Morgan's script emphasizes the role of television in forging collective memory. The Nixon/Frost interviews might be a cultural footnote now, but they helped define Richard Nixon for a generation of Americans. If David Frost had not been equal to the task of forcing Nixon to confront the magnitude of the Watergate crimes, a president whose contempt for the constitution beggar belief may well have won a public rehabilitation with potentially disastrous consequences for American political life. Watergate was a mass of confusing details and droning congressional hearings. What made it stick to Nixon, in the end, was the squirming, tortured contrition he showed to David Frost's unblinking cameras.

Television, Frost/Nixon shows, may trivialize, but it also reveals like no other medium. Richard Nixon's political image was largely defined by the glistening of his sweaty upper lip under TV lights. One one level, this was profoundly unfair, but considering Nixon's apocalyptic resentment, inability to connect on a human level with pretty much anyone, and his pathological untruthfulness, those shiny little beads of perspiration were in many ways all one needed to know about what kind of president the man was.