Frost/Nixon

History has a habit of throwing up stories that are well worth the movie treatment as the events are better than anything a scriptwriter can make up. Watergate is one of those incidents and naturally there has already been a few, pretty good, movies based on the event and its major players. Frost/Nixon, as the name suggests, looks at the aftermath, and in particular the interviews David Frost conducted with the shamed former president.

There's plenty of meat to the real life events, yet the film fails to capture this. It feels somewhat empty, devoid of the tension a film needs. One of the major problems with making a film based on events that are well known is that the audience already knows the solution. The aim of the filmmakers then has to be drawing the audience in to the extent that they forget that it isn't a work of fiction and that things may actually turn out different from history. Frost/Nixon's director Ron Howard already achieved this feat with the genuinely gripping Apollo 13 but the real life events played out as if they were a movie. Frost/Nixon's major problem is that the events are dull out with the interviews. The subplots about financing and internal splits in Frost's teams never quite grip and feel superfluous, even if they did happen.

One of Frost/Nixon's major problems is that it's beginnings lie in the theatre. What works there doesn't necessarily on film. Thus a narrative based around a series of interviews with little other plot may work on stage but it makes for dry cinema. Also the performances of Michael Sheen and Frank Langella feel stilted, as if they are playing to an audience. They may have worked in the theatre but on screen they are nothing more than pretty good impersonations of the real people. In fact it beggars belief that Langella received an Oscar nod for best actor. It seems it's purely because he's a lot like Nixon. Far better is Sam Rockwell, again proving that he's a criminally underrated actor, doing his best to elevate James Reston above typical liberal ranter. Kevin Bacon also gives his usual dependable turn as Jack Brennan, conveying some genuine emotion in an otherwise emotionless man as he witnesses his boss go down.

Sadly Frost/Nixon is a bit of a damp squib which struggles to break free of its theatrical beginnings or overcome the inevitability of its events. Ron Howard fails to wring any tension from one of the most significant events in American history leading to a dull, academic experience that may have worked better as a documentary.