Frost/Nixon - Revisted -upon second viewing
A second viewing confirms that this is a top quality production and certainly one of the very best from the 2008 crop of Hollywood films. The script's simply delicious given the source material's dry potential. Whet your appetites and prepare for one devious battle of wits. I now can also say that sadly Michael Sheen, who has avoided the spotlight thus far, most definitely deserves far more recognition. He is stellar alongside the highly acclaimed Langella.
FROST/NIXON
By Ron Howard
The beauty in Ron Howard’s FROST/NIXON, a filmed adaptation of Peter Morgan’s stirring word play is how Howard was essentially able to take the stage material and, together with the playwright, gloriously adapt it for the big screen, from the camera’s viewpoint, opening it up ever so slightly and making these verbose exchanges a fun and exciting game to watch, a tennis match for the brain.
FROST/NIXON is mostly captivating when it, strikingly, captures the worn-out defeated and deflated face of Richard Nixon at his nadir. It is a film filled with plenty of such visually telling, confessional studies of that notoriously famous face, its lines and creases. Exceptionally well played by Frank Langella, the Nixon on film, as opposed to the one Langella originated on the Broadway stage, is even more imposing and impacting, as the camera captures his every painful look of guilt, pride and regret, up close and personal, something the stage was unable to do.
Yet while his are the best moments of FROST/NIXON, they are hardly the only effective ones. The film itself, turns out, slowly unfolds to the rhythm of mystery [with an excellent noir-duet score by Hans Zimmer] towards its stirring conclusion and easily ends up as one of this year’s most exceptional Hollywood releases. And Howard, Morgan and company, who have, together, expanded on the play, should be very proud of their results, as every single technical and creative aspect of the film is a top-notch achievement.
The battle of wits between British television host-cum-interviewer David Frost and humiliated ex-president of the Unites States Richard Nixon is played out like a near-murder mystery, a political Sleuth or Deathtrap, a cat and mouse chase film whose subject is all too real. And although no murder ever takes place, it might as well, since re-enacting the thought process that brought a desperate-to-be-taken-seriously Frost to guide Nixon to the nearest thing to a Watergate confession has all the trappings of such a glorious crime story. Turning Frost into a little Columbo, outsmarting his real-life opponent, without losing credulity is a challenge but in FROST/NIXON it simply works.
In yet another fabulous interpretation by Michael Sheen [THE QUEEN], also reprising his role from the stage, he plays the role of Frost with such spitfire charisma and energy, in direct contrast to Langella’s Nixon, in his desperate need to prove once and for all that he too is a serious newscaster.
They say that the real interviews between the two men were never this interesting and the sparring never this creative but still you have to give it Morgan’s imagination that he constructs, both, a duelling yet respectful relationship between the hunter and his prey. Thus, the interview results are reconstructed with such an element of high drama. Not a surprise given Morgan’s previous successful screenplays for the similarly plotted THE QUEEN & THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND.
Just about everything in FROST/NIXON is polished with a professional glee. Howard has really managed to use the play’s introverted ideas and turn them into an ocular mind game. To think that we can still get swayed by watching David Frost illicit a confession out of Tricky Dickey – a legendary tale so old that it may even seem irrelevant by now – but, by golly, we do care and we do anticipate the end result. Even if we know it, we still want to hear the shameful plea coming out of the mouth of the man America once named the most distrusted President in US history.
FROST/NIXON turns out to be one of those films where you can just tell that somebody knew what they were doing all along. I can just imagine Ron Howard watching the play, really stirred as he first experiences it; And then, perhaps a second viewing in the dark and perhaps yet another one [over and over again], just imagining how he would play it out on film. And then – shot for shot – Howard goes ahead and fulfils his commitment by reinventing FROST/NIXON, basically turning it into a digestible and entertaining film about an confident intellectual fleabag pitted against a frivolous insecure egoist, and then methodically mixing it all up. And with all due respect to both his subjects, the material was right there all along in real life.
No comments:
Post a Comment