Frost/Nixon.

"As with The Queen, screenwriter Peter Morgan once again pits a Michael Sheen underdog against a titanic adversary in Frost/Nixon, Sheen in this case embodying playboy cream puff British talk-show host David Frost, and his nemesis being Tricky Dick (Frank Langella), whom Frost famously interviewed over several months in 1977," writes Nick Schager. "In terms of condescending narrative handholding, Frost/Nixon has no 2008 rival, as Morgan's script and Ron Howard's direction maniacally avoid anything like subtext or visual storytelling, their tale's every argument made painfully plain by dialogue - much of it coming from framing-device, faux-documentary hindsight interviews with the main players - that demonstrates a devotion to telling rather than showing."

Updated through 12/6.

"Frost/Nixon is unsatisfying even if, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of Nixon-bashing," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Morgan makes him out to be a Great White Whale, but when he sat down with Frost, Nixon was already dead in the water—convicted by his own words in White House transcripts to the point where even his Republican allies had long deserted him. And with selective editing, Morgan makes it seem as if Frost got Nixon to admit more than he actually did."

"Frost/Nixon offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it," finds Anthony Lane in the New Yorker; "the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can't escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn't warranted by the events. Why is it meant to be so important to us whether David Frost revives his career?"

"Frost/Nixon is the first major political movie of the Obama era, not just because of its timing but because of its temperament," argues Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Howard, a vocal Obama supporter, has given us a let-bygones-be-bygones view of the 37th POTUS, a look at history through the lens of our so-called post-partisan mindset."

Earlier: Reviews from London.

Updates: "Frost/Nixon is a trivial afterword to a historical footnote, a showbiz story inflated into a retroactive therapy session for one of 20th-century America's biggest knaves," writes Bill Weber at Slant.

Capone has a long talk with Ron Howard for AICN.

Online listening tip. IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore "look at the different ways journalists have been portrayed on screen, from backbiting magazine staffers to fast-talking, amoral reporters and cynical TV talking heads, with the occasional heroic turn throw in."

Updates, 12/3: "Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV mini-series, and operas?" asks J Hoberman in the Voice. "Just as Nixon's beetle brows, ski nose, and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and psycho-historians." As for the film at hand, "Howard has beefed up the supporting roles - Kevin Bacon plays Nixon's aide, Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell are Frost's researchers, and Rebecca Hall has the decorative role of Frost's mistress. In opening up the play, however, the movie unavoidably dissipates its power."

"With the awards season swirling around us, Mr Langella and Mr Sheen will be hard to overlook when all the prizes are dispensed," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "And the picture itself should be on many must-see and 10-best lists, all honors it richly deserves."

"It's not as if Nixon needed to be nailed on prime-time TV," writes Phil Nugent:

One reason why the media's soft treatment of him in his declining years doesn't infuriate as much as it might is that the truth is known, and history's verdict is in. Nixon had the enterprising decency to record every word he said while he was hanging out in his office plotting villainy with the rest of the Gashouse Gang, and those tapes have been preserved and transcribed and widely disseminated. Nothing that the hobbits left standing in his cheering section do or say really matters, because his every grotesque utterance is right there, establishing the scale of his perfidy so that his subsequent dishonesty and self-delusion can be precisely outlined. That's why, at some point, I found myself wondering how much Frost/Nixon actually grew out of Morgan's yearning to know just what George W Bush knew and when he knew it. How much of his job performance was the result of simple imbecility and how much the result of conscious, deliberate planning? We will never known for sure.

Playlist notes that Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post during and after the Watergate scandal, does not approve of the film: "Nixon never was sorry for what he did."

Online listening tip. Variety's Ted Johnson talks with Ron Howard.

Scott Marks:

Staged like a boxing match, Frost/Nixon should probably be graded round by round. For those who missed the obvious, the dialog is riddled with boxing metaphors. Morgan's script and structure are right, but Howard's pacing of the individual scenes is all off. He nails a tripod to the floor to film an airplane sequence while going hand held in a hotel room. There are quick rack focus shots intended to indicate nervousness. When Nixon begins to lose it, Howard cuts to a stock low angle shot. Furthermore, there should be a law punishable by crucifixion that any screenwriter or director in any medium not be allowed to have a character turn on a television set or radio at the precise moment in time when a crucial plot point germane to the scene just happens to be being broadcast. And while I'm at it, Film Tech 101 students will goof on Ron's match cut piano keys butted together as a jump cut transition.

Updates, 12/4: "More than 35 years after he left office in disgrace, a stash of recordings has been made public confirming the popular view of Richard Nixon as a lying, venal, foul-mouthed, paranoid conspirator," reports Dan Glaister in the Guardian.

Dave Calhoun talks with Peter Morgan for Time Out.

Robert Abele profiles Michael Sheen for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. Frank Langella is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"Does Hollywood not trust moviegoers' intelligence?" asks Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Or does director Ron Howard's TV background make him assume that everything has to be repeated, just in case someone was in the kitchen making a sandwich the first time?"

"Ron Howard shows his stupidity by adapting Peter Morgan's stage play Frost/Nixon into a pseudo-TV documentary," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Another of the year's endless liberal propaganda strategies, it unsubtly displays the sanctimony that has accrued to TV journalism - in fact, Howard enshrines it."

"The film, like Frost's interviews, is not merely about Watergate - which is good, because we have, I should think, drained that well of venality fairly dry - but instead about bigger issues of accountability and process and principle," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Frost, stripped of all pretense, was asking Nixon a good question: Who the hell do you think you are? Nixon, stripped of all pretense, was asking an equally good question: Who the hell are you to ask?"

Online viewing tips. Vulture lists and clips the "Ten Greatest Movie Nixons."

Updates, 12/5: "Stories of lost crowns lend themselves to drama, but not necessarily audience-pleasing entertainments, which may explain why Frost/Nixon registers as such a soothing, agreeably amusing experience, more palliative than purgative," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Once again Mr Sheen, who played [Tony] Blair in both The Queen and The Deal, a made-for-British-television movie written by Mr Morgan, assumes the role of the professional sycophant who proves tougher than his breezy smiles suggest. And once again, much as he was by Helen Mirren in The Queen, the likable, watchable Mr Sheen has been pitted against a scene-stealer who, if not carefully tethered, will devour the screen by the greedy mouthful. And devour Mr Langella does, chomp chomp."

"In a masterful performance, Langella highlights Nixon's oily charm and guile," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club; "there's a reason an ugly, unpleasant man with a hangdog face, gravelly voice, perpetual 5 o'clock shadow, and sad eyes rose from nothing to become the most powerful man in the world. This is Nixon at his debate-club-president best, though he can only refrain from self-sabotage for so long. Sheen's Frost may like to think he landed the knockout blow, but in the end, only Nixon can defeat Nixon."

"[T]he parallels to our current times are striking," writes Chris Barsanti in PopMatters. "From imperial executive overreach to paranoid defensiveness, cartoon-skewed media image, and a scorched-earth attitude towards enemies (real and imagined), the end of the Nixon and Bush II eras have more in common than is comfortable for the average American liberal to comprehend."

"If there's any message in this great movie for President Bush, it's that he should take comfort," writes John Dickerson: "Nixon was only slightly more unpopular at the end of his presidency as Bush is now, and yet in the movie he comes across as relatively sympathetic. Perhaps Bush can look forward to a similar upgrade from history. Or at least from Hollywood."

Also in Slate, Dana Stevens: "Taking its cues from Rocky rather than All the President's Men, Morgan's compact, satisfying drama presents presidential interviewing as a gladiatorial event.... Really, though, Frost/Nixon's best reason for existence is to preserve the two acting showcases at its center." Plus, David Greenberg's 2007 review of the play.

"Howard has made a picture for grown-ups," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, "a well-constructed entertainment that neither talks down to its audience nor congratulates it just for showing up. That's particularly refreshing around holiday time, when the studios roll out all their big Oscar-bait pictures, bestowing upon us their most boring, stately and somber works - anything that spells 'quality' with a capital 'Q,' even if genuine craftsmanship is sorely missing."

"Frost/Nixon is about the belated awakening of a guilty conscience," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York; "as such, it feels a touch too late to today's hopeful moment. (It's the best film of 2006.) But to luxuriate in Langella's magnificent performance - as a man unable to small-talk, unable to pet a dachshund convincingly, who can feel only privately - is to appreciate how movies can ennoble even the worst of us."

"Like [Oliver] Stone, Howard paints Nixon a little more sympathetically than many of us who remember the era are likely to warm to," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "Nixon was an unlovable scoundrel, a villain who would have dismantled the Constitution, had he been able to."

Howard takes "a silk purse of a project, making it even silkier and producing perhaps the best work of his career in the process," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

Beaks talks with Sheen for AICN.

"[W]hat was a pageant on the stage becomes an intimate, magnified TV show, the camera alert to every nuance of Frost's insecurity rising to bravado, Nixon's pugnacity gradually sagging into defeat," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "This very fine movie doesn't make history, but it captures history as few others have."

Update, 12/6: "In a Daily Beast exclusive, broadcaster David Frost and the actor who plays him, Michael Sheen, talk about how he (they!) broke through Nixon's defenses, the truth about the drunken phone call and the most unexpected sequel to the interview. Plus, interviews with the former aide depicted in the film, Diane Sawyer, and the former girlfriend, played by Rebecca Hall, who has at Frost's side throughout, Caroline Graham."

Posted by dwhudson at December 1, 2008 1:35 AM