Review: 'Frost/Nixon' Fascinating Despite Flaws

The story is so captivating, and the slice of history so compelling, that we wish the filmmakers would just get on with it. It's one thing for a movie to wow you -- but it's something quite different when you see a movie filled with characters who keep telling you how wowed you should be. By the end of it all, "Frost/Nixon" felt a little too self-aware, becoming lost in its own sense of self-importance.

Let's start with the juicy stuff -- the material that has already made for a captivating TV spectacle and award-winning theater production. In 1977, British journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen), exiled from serious journalism to a life of interviewing celebrities in Australia, is struck with inspiration. He will return to prominence through securing the first post-resignation interview with Richard Nixon (Frank Langella).

His desire is driven partly by journalistic curiosity, but far more by pure ratings. He asks his colleague to look up the ratings for Nixon's resignation speech, and he realizes that any substantial interview to follow that stonewalling will be must-see on a global level.

This is a underdog story if there ever was one, a foreign nobody trying to get an interview with the man everyone on the planet wants to talk to. It's a long shot, and that's exactly what intrigues Nixon's people, when Frost comes calling. Frost seems like such an unlikely contender that they assume he's a pushover, a pushover with motives of a more monetary variety. Nixon's agent tells the former president that he should consider doing the interview for a substantial sum of money.

The talk-show host is only too happy to oblige. So at price tag of $600,000, Frost pays America's most reviled public man to agree to a 12-day, 28-hour interview, to be divided up into four 90-minute broadcasts.

There are two separate chess games playing out in Peter Morgan's script -- derived from his own stage production -- and four separate dramatic arcs. Chess game No. 1 occurs prior to the interviews, as Frost scrambles to find a way to raise enough money to deliver on the $600,000 pledge.

In the days leading up to the interviews, this journalist, with his career and reputation hanging in the balance, is spending his days running to American television networks, begging for syndication fees.

When they scoff at paying a foreign journalist for content, he resorts to sponsorships. When big sponsors back out at the first whiff of bad press, he goes smaller. He is a reporter-playing-salesman, growing more frustrated by the day.

Knowing that he will walk into his interviews unprepared, he hires two researchers to dig up the good stuff that he can ask the president: Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), smart people who grow increasingly wary of the fact that they are spending all hours of the day researching the facts, while Frost is out there hocking the event to sponsors. How successful will this sit-down be, if the interviewer is wholly uneducated on the topic? Chess game No. 2 occurs within a California home, under the glare of television spotlights. Armed with Bob and Jack's questions, Frost is slow in realizing that he has under prepared. Tricky Dick is no mere celeb. He's made a career out of avoiding tough questions and reframing reality.

As the days tick by, and Nixon politely bullies his way through the questions, eating up the hours in hopes of reaching 28 without ceding too much ground, Bob and Jack become exasperated. They tell Frost that he must push back, that he must find a way to be serious and rude.

There's a journalistic story here, about the art of the interview, but "Frost/Nixon" feels less like a movie about reporting than a courtroom drama, with the guilty man sneering in the certainty that he will never be caught. Cross-examining him is a man who, in every fiber of his being, is the opposite of Nixon.

Outgoing, charismatic, handsome and easygoing, Frost seems to exist in a separate universe from the former president, and the movie's most magical moments come as Nixon marvels at his questioner. To some degree, this president's fear of people is what sparked his downfall, and in "Frost/Nixon" we finally see an insecure man made rudely aware of his insecurities.

There's no denying that this is Oscar season, and that "Frost/Nixon" is being pumped up as one of the year's awards darlings. That said, its chances are strongest in the acting categories. Langella does more than merely imitate Nixon, and Sheen does more than simply play a pretty-boy television personality. Together, they embody their characters, as two fish in unfamiliar waters, both struggling desperately to prove themselves to their respective unbelievers. And they slowly come to recognize their similarities. The careers of both men are hanging by a thread, and the two isolated, haunted men can identify their precarious positions. This is never made clearer than in a fictitious, drunken phone call, during which a down-and-out Frost listens to a drunken Nixon rage about those who misjudge him.

"Frost/Nixon" is a captivating, creatively staged spectacle, held back from greatness only by the fact that it so clearly wants to be great. Each time we are reminded about the importance of this interview, of the failings of Nixon and of the social unrest embroiling the nation, Morgan and director Ron Howard jolt us out of the drama.

It says something larger about the movie's problems, that the drunken Frost-Nixon phone call lingers more in the memory than any of the film's interview footage. It's the one time in "Frost/Nixon" that the oppressive contextualizing is finally stripped away, and we are allowed to simply get lost in these two characters -- two lonely men, brought together through greed, compelled to finally care about something bigger than themselves.