Frost/Nixon

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Interesting but bloodless adaptation of a hit play.

In 1977, interviewer David Frost persuaded disgraced US president Richard Nixon, who had resigned almost three years earlier, to submit to several days of interviews.

The encounter was the basis of a 2006 hit play by Peter Morgan, who wrote

The Queen

, and several directors, including Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, George Clooney and Sam Mendes wanted to direct the screen version. In the end, the job went to Howard, the master of an unsubtle and glossy directorial style which seems to lend a sunlit sheen to the darkest drama (who can forget the appalling

A Beautiful Mind

).

That's the problem here.

The play tackled, reportedly with great success, the challenge of fashioning a drama from two men sitting in chairs, by conceiving of it as part-Greek tragedy, part-gladiatorial clash of the titans.

The film casts Sheen (Tony Blair in

The Queen

) and Langella, who created the roles in the West End, but even with their more-than-competent impersonations, Howard, filming relentlessly in medium close-up and close-up, dilutes rather than distills the drama.

There is no sense of danger in the meeting of minds, no sense of revelation, of history in the making. It seems like ... well, like two actors re-creating a historic moment as a lifelike but bloodless moving tableau.

Details jar, too. Media-savvy 21st-century audiences know that "three-two-one" cue-ins don't happen in pre-recorded interviews but the film uses them (several times) as a heavy-handed dramatic device.

And the climactic flurry of research that enabled Frost to fell his quarry just doesn't add up; he and a team including some hot-shot journalists had been working on the project for months.

Langella's syrupy voice, far richer and more orotund than Nixon's, is that of a man trying to reach the balcony, though Sheen occasionally achieves an eerie facsimile of Frost's fey tones.

But the film, in the end, feels less like a drama than like notes for a history exam. It's interesting enough, but it awakens interest in the six-hour originals which, not coincidentally, have just been released on DVD.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Frank Langella, Michael Sheen

Director:

Ron Howard

Running time:

122 mins

Rating:

M (offensive language)

Screening:

Academy, Lido, Rialto, SkyCity, Hoyts from Boxing Day