October
17
London Reviews: Frost/Nixon and Quantum of Solace
Perhaps remembering last year's Oscar campaign for Atonement, which some Oscar-watchers felt peaked too early, Universal is holding back on Frost/Nixon, which is perceived by many to be 2008's Oscar front-runner. But suddenly Universal's slow-burn Oscar campaign is at the mercy of the London film critics. Spread at click-speed, the first London Film Festival review by The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw happened to be negative. Stateside trade reviews proved more positive. And many bloggers were pissed that they hadn't yet been invited to see the movie.
Here's a sampling of LFF reviews:
The James Bond movie Quantum of Solace is reviewed in London as well:
The Independent's Geoffrey McNab wants more "humour."
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says it's "a crash-bang Bond."
The Times' James Christopher says villain Mathieu Amalric has a "wormy arrogance"
London Times * * * * (4 out of 5)
By James ChristopherPeter Morgan’s pin-sharp drama about the television duel between Richard Nixon and David Frost charts an iconic moment of armchair history. Forty-five million people tuned in during the summer of 1977 to see if Britain’s glossy talk-show star could picklock a public apology from the disgraced ex-President. Ron Howard turns this contest between Michael Sheen’s playboy and Frank Langella’s marvellous old creep into one of the most compelling cinema waltzes I’ve yet seen.
The rumble is fuelled by vanity. This is the trial that Nixon never had. Langella’s stooped and baggy Nixon has spent three years in the wilderness tending his memoirs. He has stonewalled every journalist. His gamble to spill the beans to Frost in four rigidly demarcated interviews is a stroke of icy genius. If it goes well it could be a ticket back to Washington, a “way back to the sun”.
Sheen’s cocky Frost is already half-drunk on his own glamour. The first interview is car-crash television. Nixon taunts Frost with promises that there are “no holds barred”. Then he slips in a rabbit punch seconds before the cameras roll: “Did you fornicate last night?”. Frost retaliates with Cambodia, Vietnam, and “Why didn’t you burn the [Watergate] tapes?” But he can’t land a single glove.
Nixon rolls brilliantly with the punches. Sheen’s nightclubbing Frost is bewildered. “I’m in this for everything I’ve got got,” he wails to his girlfriend Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall) whom he handily snaffled on the first class flight to LA. “Why didn’t anyone stop me?”
Frost’s corner men — the veteran reporter (Oliver Platt), the veteran nutter (Sam Rockwell), and the veteran producer, John Burt (Matthew Macfadyen) — spend the entire film in comic poses of despair. In the opposite corner, Kevin Bacon’s chief of staff, Colonel Jack Brennan, doesn’t break sweat. “Long answers, control the space, don’t let him in,” he smugs.
The build-up to the final confrontation is an absolutely electric piece of cinema, not least because there are vertiginous moments where history is being reminted before your eyes. Does Nixon roll over? It’s a question that will launch a thousand festival debates. The surprise, perhaps, is how much sympathy Howard’s film generates for Langella’s broody, tight-arsed, antihero.
There’s a wonderfully seedy suspicion that Nixon may have sensed that his legacy would mean nothing without a confession: a realisation that to preserve the decent bits of his presidency he might have to fall on his sword.
This is the ingenious point of Morgan’s great script, and it is a horribly relevant tale.
Evening Standard * * * * (out of 5)
By Nick CurtisFrost/Nixon the movie is festival’s power opener: Gripping account of a titanic clash.
Ron Howard’s film is surprisingly gripping….Frost/Nixon weaves into a compelling drama of two very different men locked into a gladiatorial combat for the limelight. For this we have not only Howard to thank, but also the writers and the stars…Some of the best acting on the screen is done by Sheen with his eyes alone. Behind Nixon’s arrogance Langella manages to generate sympathy for a man who cannot admit he is the architect of his own downfall. There are flaws. Rebecca Hall…seems to be there simply to underline his playboy credentials…And although Howard and Morgan try to open out the story it still sometimes has the enclosed feel of a play. But this is a fine intelligently written and superlatively acted piece which addresses fame, ambition, and the problems faced by impoverished Brits trying to chisel a niche in the American entertainment market.
Empire * * * * (out of 5)
By Ian NathanIn the summer of 1977, David Frost was a dandy with collars wide enough for take-off and a smile as slippery as an oil slick. His mouth ranneth over with oleaginous charm, a perfected ooze granting him entry into the lofty offices of TV’s oligarchy and the knickers of pretty debutantes. As a freelance talk-show host and nondescript journalist, television’s shallow bravado ran through his veins like the vintage champagne he used to both fuel the verve and null the sensation he was adding up to little more than a vaudeville act with a quick wit.
Michael Sheen, Britain’s smartest chameleon, has a feel for the torn edges of loudmouths — his Kenneth Williams was caustic and brittle, his Tony Blair quick witted and edgy, and we can but greedily anticipate his forthcoming stint as egocentric football whiz Brian Clough for That Damned United. As Frost, Sheen gives first the camp exterior then the moral voice mustering its strength like Hulk ready to rip through his silk shirts. It’s a magnificent announcement of a performance — a pitch perfect impression and a layered character, a hero spotted with vanity. His battle with Nixon made Frost a world player; its fictional counterpart could make Sheen our finest export.
At about this time, ex-president Richard Milhous Nixon was a confused man. America had either forgotten him or despised him, especially as a recent pardon over the imbroglio of Watergate meant he would never stand trial. Even so, from his idle perch in a Californian cliff-top villa he proudly if ignorantly clung to the ideal he had always done his utmost for the nation. He had never so much as apologised, but the enfeebling of his political clout and the guilt, his own poisonous Hulk within, were unpicking the denial. Agreeing to an interview with this British popinjay would swell his bank balance, and give him a fix of what he craved most: a comeback.
The all-too unsung Frank Langella, who stoops and rumbles and roars, played Nixon to Sheen’s Frost in Peter Morgan’s original stage-play and Ron Howard valiantly refuses to mess with the formula even if a studio might crave bigger names. Where Sheen is dead-on Frost, Langella only circles Nixon. He admirably steeps him in flawed nobility and self-deception, but besides his ache for former glory and a quick buck, there’s not enough slime in his Tricky Dicky. Both Anthony Hopkins, turning him into Richard II for Nixon, and Dan Hedaya, doing a puffed up rube for Dick, found a black humour, an inescapable scoundrel that made more sense. Langella’s more ambiguous foe is hardly debilitating, but it saps the sense of real history unfolding.
Then Howard’s confident adaptation is as much about television as it is politics. Like the equally contained and talky Good Night… And Good Luck, it is a celebration of the necessity of journalism, the kind that at its best can still shake nations (highly pertinent in this age of neo-con drivel like Fox News). What Frost achieved was the nearest thing to a trial of Richard Nixon, landing a spiritual conviction.
Morgan’s screenplay expects a fair amount of Watergate savvy from its audience. The structure is partly mock-doc, various talking heads recalling the momentous interview from the present but scant history is given. In main, Howard opts for brainy soap (on a comparable tack to Morgan’s script for The Queen), tracking Frost’s struggle for TV backing, how far out on a limb he was dangling, before stepping into the arena with an old dog well-versed in tormenting upstart journos.
If skirting the political grist weakens the film’s intellectual range, it strengthens its commercial viability — Howard realises what is implicit in the script: it’s a boxing match. Thus, he re-structures the more lethargic play as a sports movie, where the ‘good guys’ train, argue, fathom their opponent, and just at the point Nixon has Frost on the ropes, clinging on for dear life, he digs deep and turns the fight. Fact gets a mythical polish, but this is not documentary, it’s gripping, dynamic drama exactly because of its grandstanding, given valiant support by unflagging talents like Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon, Matthew Macfayden, and an excellent Sam Rockwell as left-wing rabble-rouser James Reston.
One of the key elements of Morgan’s play was the birth of the TV close-up — that the camera can divine the truth even as words tie knots — and Howard lets his camera become a participant, closing in on its quarry. It’s something that elevates the movie far above the stage-play — we can see their faces. And it is in Nixon’s ghostly eyes, the beads of sweat on his brow, the twinges at the corner of his smile, that it became clear that Frost had snared his man.
Verdict
Stirring stuff that works thrillingly as drama, and should make Sheen a star, even if it compromises on historical insight.
Independent * * * (out of 5)
By Geoffrey MacnabFrost/Nixon, Gala opening, London Film Festival A rumble in the studio as Frost takes aim at Nixon
Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon is a perverse endeavour – a big Hollywood film based on a chamber play that was in its turn inspired by a 1977 TV interview by chatshow host David Frost of disgraced former US president Richard Nixon. In one way, film is the perfect medium for a drama that ultimately hinges on a single close-up when, after all his evasions and self-deceptions, Nixon finally accepts guilt for his role in the Watergate scandal. Nixon, played with real gravitas and pathos by Frank Langella, is suddenly seen at his most vulnerable. His face is a map of conflicting emotions. Seen on a big screen, this moment has a power that would be hard to match either on stage or TV. However, the rest of the film rarely matches this sequence in either its intensity or its simplicity.
For all the archive footage, flash backs and flash forwards and attempts to give Frost (Michael Sheen) and Nixon the weight of characters in a Greek tragedy, the material remains stubbornly uncinematic. The problem the filmmakers face is that this is a talking heads drama.
We may admire the performances and Peter Morgan's writing, but the nagging suspicion remains that we are caught in some no man's land between drama and documentary. The language that Frost's team and Nixon's team use is of sporting combat. Their metaphors are frequently drawn from boxing. "I shall be your fiercest adversary. I shall come at you with everything I got," Nixon tells his interviewer. At times, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a follow-up to Leon Gast's When We Were Kings, with Frost as the Muhammad Ali-like underdog trying to topple George Foreman. As in the so-called "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire, Frost takes a pummelling for many rounds while he practises his own version of rope-a-dope tactics – namely failing to ask any provocative questions. Then, as the bout draws toward a close, he suddenly unleashes all his zingers about Watergate and the champ is left reeling and exposed.
At least Howard and his team recreate the late Seventies in inventive style. Their eye for detail even extends to the mushy peas that Frost and his producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen) eat in the LWT canteen. "I spent yesterday evening watching you interview the Bee Gees," a startled Birt replies when he discovers that Frost wants to tackle Nixon. As he showed playing Tony Blair in The Deal and The Queen, Sheen is an extraordinarily skilful actor. Here, his characterisation initially verges on Steve Coogan-like parody as he uses Frost's catchphrases, grins toothsomely and copies that unctuous voice. However, as with his Blair, he gradually draws you in – you forget the mimicry and begin to feel for a character who (the screenplay suggests) has staked his entire career on an interview that could easily go wrong. Frost, it's implied, is only superficial superficially. Nixon's aides expect him to "pitch puffballs" and liken his interviewing style to a "big wet kiss," but the British chatshow host turns out to be the fallen politician's equal when it comes to manipulation and ruthlessness.
There is a surprisingly Gothic feel to the filmmaking. Hans Zimmer's music is brooding and solemn. The cinematography is very dark. At one stage, we may see Hugh Hefner and some Playboy bunnies in the distance, but Hefner's brand of hedonism is little in evidence here. Earlier in his career, Frank Langella played Dracula. There is a hint of Bela Lugosi about him as he welcomes Frost and his team into his sepulchre-like office with all its old photographs of Brezhnev and other foreign leaders.
As a character study, Frost/Nixon is fascinating. The unlikely encounter between two such different protagonists is drawn in subtle and absorbing style. Where the film stutters is in its attempt to stoke up a drama that wasn't necessarily there. By the time Frost got to Nixon, it was already three years since he had stood down as president after the Watergate cover-up. Nixon's political career was over. The film publicists' claim that Frost's interview with him "changed the face of politics" seems a little over-egged.
Ron Howard excels in making big, intelligent Hollywood movies such as Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. Here, he arguably brings too much artillery for what is essentially a two-hander. He has an excellent (and extensive) supporting cast, including Kevin Bacon as Nixon's doggedly loyal aide Jack Brennan and Sam Rockwell as Frost's Nixon-hating research assistant, James Reston Jr. However, their parts – like that of the impressive Rebecca Hall as Frost's girlfriend – are never developed in any depth. The film is at its best when Frost and Nixon are face to face. The rest is a distraction.
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