Re-Interviewing History
One of the peculiar things about historic films is how they round in on people who existed and give them a new face. Inevitably the new faces are more charismatic than the originals, while certain facts get re-written for dramatic effect. It’s he nature of the beast.
I actually remember the original Frost Nixon interviews going to air in 1977 but I don’t recall the actual interviews. In any case, they were not significant moments of journalism that showed something new, but a significant moment in television where they managed to drag Nixon out from where he was living and thrust him into the limelight one more time. The problem with the film is that it accords it much more significance than the interviews actually had.
What’s Good About It
I like the period pictures that take a shot at the 1970s. I guess it’s because I can remember them so well that I get more nostalgic than need be. I’m going to hate it when they start making nostalgic pieces about the 1980s or 1990s, but doubtless, they are on the horizon, looming. The film really is a splendid production design piece.
The acting is good, if a little overwrought. Langella’s Nixon is even stodgier than Hopkin’s Nixon in ‘Nixon’ but he does manage to convey something that Nixon himself never did in the original interviews and that is pathos. Nixon and pathos go together like Nuclear waste and kiddies’ lunch boxes, so Langella’s performance deservedly got the nomination for an Oscar.
The film actually fits in nicely with a whole range of films that have attempted to portray Nixon and his presidency, from the almost contemporaneous ‘All The President’s Men’ (which seems to grow in stature as more time passes), ‘Nixon’, and the hilarious satire ‘Dick’.
What’s Bad About It
The mock-documentary interviews that seek to contextualise the interviews only serve to make the film look for more gravitas than it deserves. Was David Frost really such a lightweight host going into the interview? I doubt it. Was Richard Nixon as spent and disconnected from the view on the street as the film implies? I doubt that too. Frost actually did have a nous for politics that was very well formed, going into the interview. And by the same token, Richard Nixon in the years following his resignation was still somebody with considerable political clout. I mean, Nixon is not somebody I like, but I understand what his contributions were.
My problem with it is that it sets out to paint a picture to say that the participants were more complicated than interviews themselves let on, only to paint a picture of fairly banal participants which is not a terribly accurate reflection of the participants at all.
What’s Interesting About It
Nixon on film is surprisingly multi-faceted and difficult as portrayals go. This is because he is at once too close in time and yet too distant as a persona. Even when he smiled it was like a grimace. The very first thing I was aware of in politics was in fact Nixon’s resignation, so he casts a very strange shadow over the political consciousness of Gen-X. He was at once the most corrupt evil politician of our times, but he was also the statesman who opened up dialogue with the Communists while railing against Communism itself. There’s Nixon and Kruschev doing the kitchen conversation, the detente with Brezhnev and Gromuyko; and then there’s the visit to Beijing to meet Mao.
Clearly the man was complicated, sophisticated and intelligent. He was most probably a better thinker than either of the Bush presidents and Ronnie Reagan. It makes you wonder what twisted him so much to let Watergate happen under his watch.
All the actors we’ve seen to date get good bites out of the Nixon persona but they get such weird portions of him. Langella’s Nixon is pugnacious, almost like a prize fighter, if a little punch-drunk from too many bouts in the ring. Anthony Hopkins’ Nixon was introspective and aloof to the point of near-incoherence. Dan Hedaya’s Nixon was hysterically paranoid. All of the interpretations are actually representative of how the world saw Nixon, and yet even after all these films we walk away feeling something of the unknowable about Nixon.
When we see the footage of the actual interview today, he is far less portentous than Langella’s portrayal. He’s actually circumspect and yet far less guarded. He flashes a smile in one of the interactions that Langella doesn’t. It’s not like Nixon was devoid of a personal charm – and he must have some of it to convince his fellow Republicans to at leas let him run for office.
He’s history’s bad guy because of his legacy, but when you look closer, there are many aspects to the man himself outside of his career that is actually quite interesting. The incongruity is such that dare I say, if he were a boxer, he’d be Mike Tyson.
The film offers one window into understanding Richard Nixon, but it’s one of many. Richard Nixon was a very strange man.

Jeter has this quote about Hideki Matsui:

