ShareThis"Frost/Nixon," written by Peter Morgan, was a hit on Broadway in 2007, with Frank Langella garnering both Tony and Drama Desk awards for Best Actor for his performance as former President Richard Nixon. A year later, it was made into a successful movie, generating generally excellent reviews and receiving five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Director (Ron Howard), Actor (Langella) and Screenplay (Morgan).
But "Frost/Nixon," out on DVD this week (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $29.98, rated R), has not been without controversy -- which is perhaps to be expected, considering the controversial nature of its primary subject, a disgraced presidency. The movie purports to tell the true story of British talk-show host David Frost (played by Michael Sheen, who also portrayed Frost alongside Langella's Nixon on the London and Broadway stages) and his four-part interview with the former president, which aired on U.S. television in 1977. The interviews represented the first time Nixon subjected himself to questions about his presidency -- including his continuation of the war in Vietnam and his participation in the Watergate scandal.
"Frost/Nixon" is, of course, a drama, not a documentary, and a certain amount of consolidation and simplification of events is not only permissible but necessary. One of the DVD bonus features, "The Real Interview," includes excerpts from the 1977 broadcasts, director Howard vigorously defends his film's veracity, methodology and occasional departures from the historical record, saying, "It's not a re-enactment. That would take 12 hours. It's a reflection ... An overall truth has been achieved."
Even more forcefully, Howard states: "Every powerful line, every turning point, as depicted by Peter (Morgan), you can find in those interviews."
These are the interviews in which Nixon was alternately apologetic ("I made mistakes that weren't worthy of a president" and "I let the American people down"), unctuous (his mistakes "were mistakes of the heart rather than of the head"), self-pitying ("My political life is over") and bitter toward his enemies ("I gave them a sword and they stuck it in"). And these comments are faithfully and artfully delivered by Langella in "Frost/Nixon."
Yet one of the most dramatic moments in the movie occurs when Frost finally gets the former president to admit that "I was involved in a cover-up, as you call it."
Unfortunately, Nixon apparently said no such thing during the actual television interviews. According to an essay by political reporter Elizabeth Drew that was posted on the online Huffington Post shortly after "Frost/Nixon" was released in movie theaters last December, what Nixon actually said was far from an admission of guilt: "You're wanting me to say that I participated in an illegal cover-up. No!"
For Drew, this distortion is part of a larger pattern of dishonesty by the filmmakers. Although some of her accusations seem minor or insignificant -- such as a discrepancy between the actual interviews and the movie over who called for a break in the filming when Nixon was confronting a difficult question about Watergate -- others are more telling.
While the movie accurately shows that the Frost interviews constituted an early and much-debated example of "checkbook journalism," in which Nixon received $600,000 for his participation, Drew points out that "Frost/Nixon" does not mention that Nixon was actually guaranteed 20 percent of the profits from the sales of the interviews to television stations. This actually made Nixon a partner with Frost in the enterprise, which somewhat undermines the film's David-vs.-Goliath theme, in which the shallow talk-show host finally gets it together to metaphorically slay the deviously intelligent and evasive ex-president.
And although Drew never mentions this in her essay, Howard admits in his DVD audio commentary that one of the most defiant and telling comments Nixon makes in the final installment of the Frost interview -- that "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" -- was actually taken from a different interview Nixon gave to another reporter at a separate time.
In his commentary, Howard defends this as permissible "creative license." Indeed, Howard employs the "creative license" argument throughout his discussion of the movie.
Langella may look more like Leonid Brezhnev than Richard Nixon, but he captures the distinctive speaking style and personal idiosyncrasies of Nixon better than anyone else who has portrayed Nixon in the past, even Anthony Hopkins. Sheen is letter-perfect as the flamboyant Frost, a jet-setting talk-show host/TV personality/film producer whose ambition led him to try to take on one of the world's most skilled politicians.
(brucedancis(at)comcast.net.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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