Frost/Nixon, and Nixon again

In January I watched Frost/Nixon, which I found clever and very well-acted, but definitely not the best film of the past year, so I wasn't surprised it went home Oscar-free. Scriptwriter Peter Morgan on whose play it was based thrives on odd couples - Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in The Deal, Tony Blair and the Queen in The Queen, even The Last King of Scotland in a way, with its Idi Amin and fictional character Nicholas Garrigan double act. Frost/Nixon, though, owes something to another film-based-on-a-play as well, in my opinion - A Few Good Men, which employs a similar "heavyweight contender versus shallow prettyboy loses in the last twist because of his contempt for his shallow opponent who through this contest has become more serious and uses said contempt to goad said contender into incriminating himself" structure. Though by using Nixon as the contender, instead of a fictional character, the later film becomes more complicated than that. It also deals with the whole complicated co-dependence between politics and media as well - Nixon wants to regain control of his post-Watergate image, Frost wants to be taken seriously -, and does something Morgan is really good at, to wit, present the characters without pulling obvious gimmicks to make them more likeable than their historic counterparts. The most controversial point of the film because it was the biggest excursion into fictionality, Nixon's drunken midnight phonecall in Frost's hotel room, seemed to me entirely justified as a point of characterisation because Nixon was entirely capable of self-destructive gestures like that, and his rant on the phone isn't too dissimilar from the rants on tape we have of him. (More about these later.)

When I read British reviews, I was amused that each and every critic noted to odd it was to see Matthew McFayden play the later head of the BBC, who was Frost's producer at the time, as a likeable character. Methinks someone has still enemies, and it's not Nixon. Though actually the most sympathetic characters of the film in the traditional sense are Frost's American researchers, who are not a little despairing at the start about David F's lack of political zeal and are also Peter Morgan's way of making pointed allusions to the present and another recent American president. (Complete with outburst how America needed a trial, which they will never get, so could they please at least get a confession?) As for David Frost, he's played by Michael Sheen who seems to be Peter Morgan's muse, considering he already played Tony Blair twice for him and is set to play Brian Clough for him in the upcoming The Damned Utd, and Sheen is great in playing Frost as a vaudeville act with a quick wit and his own set of insecurities under the made-for-tv charm. You could also read the film as two very different ages confronting each other. Frost, complete with Italian shoes (which Nixon sees as effeminate yet is oddly fascinated by), hot girlfriend and lengthy hair with sideburns, is a creature of the 70s, whereas Nixon seems a ghost from the 50s, sometimes a powerful ogre and sometimes a tragic shade. Early on, one of Frost's American researchers warns him that it would be unforgivable if his interviews allowed Nixon to become sympathetic, and many a review concluded that Frank Langella's Oscar-nominated performance achieves this. I wouldn't quite use this world; one does feel pity for Nixon on occasion in the film, but Langella also never stops conveying his intelligence and ruthlessness as well. He's not a caricature, which the man himself ("you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore") could be.

Which brings me to a clip from the infamous tapes greenpear found on YouTube. In it, Nixon goes from detailing an episode of the American tv show All in the Family to a rant about homosexuals which I'd call hopelessly bizarre and over the top in its illustration of homophobia were it not for the fact we recently had reminders of a) the way the attitude Nixon displays here was anything but unusual in the 70s, see Milk with its use of archive footage of public figures who also wouldn't be believed as fictional characters in their sheer bigotry, and b) the fact said attitudes are still fashionable for a lot of politicians today (see also: Proposition 8). So: Nixon, the not-Oscar-nominated performance: