Ron Howard has made his best movie with Frost/Nixon, an electric political drama with a skin-prickling immediacy.
Howard and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan (who also wrote the original play) have the wit to portray British TV interviewer David Frost (Michael Sheen) and disgraced former President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) as David and Goliath. Frost's slingshot is a weapon that proved deadly to Nixon once before, during the Nixon/Kennedy TV debates: the all-seeing eye of the close-up lens.
His army of Israelites, intent on felling Nixon three years after President Gerald Ford pardoned him, are journalist Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), Watergate expert and author James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), British TV producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen) and Frost's smart, glamorous lover, Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall). Cushing and Birt offer Frost unwavering support; Zelnick and Reston act like his political Jiminy Crickets, trying to imbue this amiable Brit with the outrage Americans felt over Tricky Dick getting off scot-free for obstruction of justice.
The president's post-White House chief of staff, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), a former Marine, leads Nixon's army of Philistines, hoping to use the Frost/Nixon interviews to rehabilitate the tainted ex-chief executive. Bacon is typically remarkable as a right-hand man whose devotion to his boss becomes a kind of love. (No one plays servicemen better than Bacon: He was the only believable Marine in A Few Good Men.)
Toby Jones is just as extraordinary as Nixon's agent, Swifty Lazar, who mistakes his own mastery of deal-making for omniscience. That's why he assures Nixon that an encounter with Frost will be "a big wet kiss." It's piquant to remember that one-time press assistant Diane Sawyer - yes, that Diane Sawyer - was part of Nixon's team; Kate Jennings Grant plays her pleasantly in the movie.
The film whizzes by with shrewd vignettes of showbiz and political negotiations, leading to their intersection in the interviews, the apex of media-political events. With the same skill at siphoning essential drama from real events that Morgan displayed in his Tony Blair duo The Deal and The Queen (both starring Sheen as Blair), the writer emphasizes Frost's celebrity-fueled confidence and his dubious status as being famous for being famous. The Frost of this film believes that no matter how slippery a medium is the broadcast interview, he can use it to keep Nixon cornered. He offers Nixon $600,000 for intense, marathon interviews without first assembling a network of TV stations or major sponsors to back up this expensive inquisition.
