Many thought Frank Langella deserved an Oscar nomination last year for his work in Starting Out in the Evening, playing an aging New York writer named Leonard Schiller; many think he’ll get one this year for Frost/Nixon, playing a president that the intellectual, liberal Leonard probably would have loathed. But the two roles are not as dissimilar as they might appear: both men have formidable intellects; both have been exiled from the worlds that they once travelled in; and both are hoping, so late in life, to find a point of entry back inside. The big difference is that Schiller’s crimes are writ small — crimes of emotional coldness and personal failing — while Nixon’s are vast and public. And only in a public forum can he offer his apology.Not that any kind of apology seems forthcoming as Frost/Nixon begins. When the ex-president agrees to a series of TV interviews with British comedian and talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen), there’s a good chance that Frost won’t even be able to get financial backing for the project and that Nixon might pocket his $200,000 advance without even stepping before a camera. And even when the interviews do take place, with a desperate Frost carrying the bulk of the cost out of his own pocket, Nixon has every reason to believe that he’ll be able to talk rings around his politically inexperienced interviewer — perhaps even redeeming himself in the eyes of the public in the process.
Frost/Nixon is based on the stage play by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, and who has a knack for finding and dramatizing underexplored little corners of recent history — usually involving young, callow men encountering towering world leaders and struggling merely to keep their heads above water. I have a hard time, having recently watched the original Frost/Nixon Watergate interview on DVD, that Frost was as easily distracted a dilettante as Morgan makes him out to be — he seemed very sharp to me — but the David-and-Goliath conflict in Frost/Nixon is so entertaining, I can hardly object. The sick look that creeps across Frost’s face during his first interview session, as Nixon deflects all his “hardball” questions with interminable, clock-killing anecdotes, is perhaps the film’s comic high point. Sheen even duplicates Frost’s tic of absently tugging on his finger — as if wishing the gesture would cause a parachute to open and whisk him away somewhere nicer.
Langella is getting much more attention than Sheen for Frost/Nixon (much as Helen Mirren did for The Queen), but Sheen’s Frost is the character I was much more invested in. Maybe that’s because I’ve done many celebrity interviews in my life as well, and often feel myself to be as much of an intellectual lightweight as he does. My thinking on political issues is not terribly deep, and I have to admit to identifying with Frost’s inability, during the early preparation sessions for the interviews, to hold all those complicated historical facts in his head. And so, Frost’s emergence in the climactic sequence as the man who finally gets Nixon to own up to his wrongdoing in the Oval Office (or at least to admit that he “let the American people down”) is an appealing professional fantasy. (As is the scene where he meets Rebecca Hall during a flight to California, chats her up, seduces her, and convinces her to join him in his visit to Nixon’s beachhouse before the plane even reaches the runway.)
Langella plays his final few scenes beautifully: the long silence he takes before he offers his on-camera mea culpa; the strange post-interview moment where he pets a stranger’s dachshund; a final encounter with Frost where he tells his adversary how lucky he is to be able to enjoy parties and being around people. But I’m not completely sold on this performance — Langella seems constrained by the deep voice he’s adopted for the role, even though it doesn’t sound particularly like Nixon’s. Or maybe I’m just too much of a fan of Philip Baker Hall’s towering Nixon in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor to give any other interpretations of Nixon a fair shake.
What would the real Nixon think of these shadow versions of himself haunting the big screen, I wonder? If you were to ask his ghost, would he admit to ever seeing Secret Honor? Would he have laughed at Dick? Langella or Anthony Hopkins: which one does he think did him justice? Now that’s an interview I’d love to get.
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