Frosted Dick

I heartily enjoyed Frost/Nixon on a number of levels. For one, it's set up and played like a boxing match, which plays into the second level of enjoyment, that Ron Howard has made a piece of not-very-visually-spectacular history into something that might actually reach people by making it clear and understandable, not unlike my personal favorite of his movies, Apollo 13 (ripped off for Oscars by Mel Gibson/Braveheart?). The third level is performance -- not only is Frank Langella terrific as Nixon, but Michael Sheen does a great David Frost, both reprising their performances from the play by Peter Morgan, who also did the screenplay.

But what I liked best about the movie, and something I felt slightly lacking in Oliver Stone's admirably ambitious W., is the success in capturing Richard Nixon's character. While the Stone movie missed a key element of El Presidente Bush, namely his cruel cunning (he knew how to win elections by undercutting like a preppy frat president might win over a room), Morgan, Howard and Langella caught that particularly needy ambition of Nixon's, where the very thing that made him admirable -- his intelligence pulling him up out of low circumstances of birth -- was his undoing in a way emblematic of the times in which he rose.

Let me explain.

As TV's Mad Men and James Ellroy's American Tabloid so accurately depict, there's a period in 20th Century American history where the difference between what was seen and what was hidden in society was rolling downhill to a tipping point. Even now there are differences between the public perception of how business is done -- and government and sex/romance -- and what really happens behind the scenes. I believe it was a hell of a lot worse back then, as the older, more brutal ways of society bumped up against the powerful image of The American Dream, reaching a tipping point with the lies of the Vietnam War that sent American youth into the streets and led to the first big call for transparency, climaxing with Nixon's Watergate scandal.

In the movie, Nixon asks about the price of things -- just between friends -- and looks for the hidden motives behind everyone's actions, with a predilection to ascribe actions of others to their ethnicity or religion. This fascination with how things really work, clear-eyed to him but cynical to others, was part-and-parcel of his ambition. As a bright young man who got into Harvard and Yale but couldn't attend because he lacked the financial means, Nixon always felt looked down upon by the swells, an inferiority complex that drove him to doing anything to win, hence the dirty tricks dating back to his college election days. He wouldn't really ever apologize for them because that was how the world worked -- to him President Lyndon Johnson installed the tape recorder, President John F. Kennedy got us into Vietnam, he took no real personal responsibility for his own actions extending both of those practices.

It is interesting how the revival of interest in the original interviews with the release of the feature has coincided with El President Bush's interview with Charlie Gibson, a similar attempt to rescue his legacy. While the lack of personal responsibility is similar, the intellectual curiosity level is monumental:





But the failing in Nixon's own intellectual curiosity, as so well depicted in Frost/Nixon, is that he always ended up drawing the same shrunken conclusions. That's how things really work. And I'm the smartest man in the room, so I know I'm right.

What a waste.