Frost/Nixon

An engrossing drama charts Nixon's return to the limelight, writes Michael Dwyer

GIVEN ALL the hoopla in Washington DC on Tuesday, this might seem the ideal week to open a movie in which a former US president is one of the principal characters, even though that president, Richard Nixon, resigned in disgrace.

Frost/Nixonopens on a succinct compilation of newsreel footage spanning the period from 1972, when the Watergate scandal is leading the news, to the summer of 1974, as Nixon leaves the White House by helicopter.

Opened out significantly from its stage origins, the film remains true to its source, having been adapted for the screen by the playwright, Peter Morgan. It continues Morgan's preoccupation with exploring the personalities of power figures in The Queen, The Last King of the Scotlandand The Deal, which focused on Queen Elizabeth II, Idi Amin, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, respectively.

Michael Sheen, who persuasively played Blair in The Dealand The Queen, reaffirms his chameleonic talent with a slyly engaging portrayal of David Frost, acutely capturing his trademark eagerness and unstinting ambition. At the time the film is set, Frost was a successful TV presenter in Britain and Australia but had failed to crack the US market, and the movie charts the complicated negotiations that secured him an exclusive series of interviews with Nixon in 1977.

Played by Frank Langella, the wise and wily Nixon regards Frost as a lightweight and the interviews as “a duel”, and so it proceeds as the two men prepare themselves like prizefighters with research, training and tactics. During breaks, Nixon and Frost sit apart with their entourages, like boxers with their trainers on opposite sides of the ring. When they settle into their long recording sessions, Nixon proves slyly manipulative and adept at sidestepping questions and drifting into rambling anecdotes that eat up Frost’s allocated time.

Ron Howard may have seemed an unlikely choice to direct Frost/Nixon, but it’s a gamble that pays off because of his fastidious, unshowy approach to the rich material in Morgan’s screenplay.

The battle of wits at its core turns wholly absorbing in a movie made with alert attention to detail, powered by accumulating dramatic tension and performed by an exemplary cast.

What exerts the greatest fascination is Langella’s authoritative yet melancholy portrayal of Nixon – jowly and stooped, but with the gravitas gained from the trappings of power. And we realise that Nixon perceives the interviews as a means of rehabilitating his reputation.

The film ultimately contributes to that cause, viewing him more sympathetically than Oliver Stone's Nixon(1995), in which Anthony Hopkins portrayed him as a brooding man tormented by his past, or Robert Altman's Secret Honor(1984), featuring Philip Baker Hall's tour de force solo performance as a self-pitying Nixon, drunkenly ranting and raging.

Howard’s more low-key and consistently satisfying film is spiked with flashes of subtle humour, as when Nixon remarks without a trace of irony: “I wouldn’t want to be a Russian leader. They never know when they’re being taped.”