"What I'm saying is, when the president does it, it's not illegal."

Well, I feel like a huge idiot tonight. At the same time, I also feel somewhat enriched.

All the way back in December, I had passed on checking out Frost/Nixon. Part of the reason was the fact that I didn’t have a huge amount of money on me (and still don’t), but another part of it was my dismissal of the film as blatant Oscar bait. I was ultimately right when I thought about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire in this way.

But I was so, so very wrong about this film.

As you can guess, I just saw this film on DVD today. I was treated to it by my professor, Dr. Jonathan Silverman, as a reward for getting all the way through his Feature Writing class. While it does have some moments that, at first glance, seem to say, “I’ll have 10 Oscars please,” there really aren’t enough to slap this film with that label. This is probably the best film I’ve seen about the 1970s American media grilling Nixon like a juicy tenderloin since All The President’s Men.

Expressive hand gestures can't save you this time, Nixon. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios.

Directed by Ron Howard and written by Peter Morgan, this film is a re-telling of the story behind the television interviews that British TV host David Frost (Michael Sheen) held with former president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). As you can guess, these were the interviews where Nixon pretty much admitted what he did, after just about everyone in America at the time had called him out on it. It is kind of weird how the movie is shot. It’s sort of a faux-documentary, so instead of the actual people involved speaking on the subject, we get actors playing the people involved reading off what they wrote.

Things start to get heated between the interviewer and the interviewee. Still courtesy of Film School Rejects.

There was probably a lot of guess-work done by the writers, I can’t really comment on how accurate everything is. The pacing, however, was pitch-perfect. It seems that the movie gets tired of Nixon stonewalling Frost around the same time we do, and it immediately cuts to the good stuff. It’s great, it really is. This screenplay was patched together so well that it’s almost seamless. The fantastic cast just makes it even better. The banter between James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) makes for some engaging comic relief, and Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), while not really having too many lines, shines pretty brightly, at least for the first and second acts. Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) was played off as one of the scariest hard-asses I’ve ever seen in a film like this. I also love how Langella and Sheen played both their characters. They set it up like a debate club version of Rocky. Frost is just getting devastated for the first three rounds, but of course we all know he comes back around to win it in the last round, and he does it with a new-found sense of dignity. In a way, Nixon was really asking for it. Speaking of him, this has to be one of the most human visions of Nixon I’ve seen in recent years. When watching this film, one really gets a good idea of just how much he was robbed at last year’s Oscars.

Seen here is David Frost mackin-er, I mean, working on his interviewing skills with a Ms. Caroline Cushing. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios.

So thank you, Dr. J. This just may be the last time I dismiss a movie because of over-hyping alone.