Frost the Snowman

Classic interviews have a way of fastening themselves like barnacles to the reputations of their subjects–as when Roger Mudd asked Teddy Kennedy why he wanted to be president and Kennedy found himself entirely unable to answer, or when Ted Turner got so enraged at Peter Ross Range’s probing questions for Playboy that he ripped the tape recorder from Range’s hands and smashed it. Something was crystallized in these moments, something about the character of the subject that had never quite come into focus before. That is what happens when an interview really matters. The only comparable moment in recent times was Sarah Palin’s encounter with Katie Couric; time will tell whether the residue of it interferes with Palin’s future prospects.

One interview that did not succeed in this way was David Frost’s marathon grilling of Richard Nixon in 1977. The Frost interview ran for six hours over four nights, everybody in the world watched it, and no one ever gave it a second thought. Twenty-eight years later, the British playwright Peter Morgan decided to use it as the basis for Frost/Nixon, a docu-play that was a sensation in London, a modest hit on Broadway, and has now become an Oscar-hungry film directed by Ron Howard. The film is made with Howard’s characteristic immediacy and force. He is the most skilled craftsman among present-day Hollywood directors, and he keeps Frost/Nixon moving at a runaway pace that makes its remarkably banal storyline–essentially, the preparation for and filming of a TV chat–seem exciting and even important.

Nonetheless, the movie is malarkey, if for no other reason than that it treats the interview as an earthshaking event–as the judgment of history itself on Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). Because he resigned before he could be impeached and was pardoned by Gerald Ford, Nixon was never compelled to answer hostile questions about Watergate in court. One of the film’s characters says the interview, for which Frost paid Nixon $600,000 (the equivalent of $2 million today), should be “the trial Nixon never had.”

The question the movie poses is whether Frost is up to the challenge of being the prosecutor in that trial, as he is, in Morgan’s reckoning, a lightweight television celebrity of no standing whatsoever, a combination of Regis Philbin and Ryan Seacrest. And according to Morgan, Frost is on the verge of letting Nixon get away with it until a late-night phone call from the former president reveals the great man’s essential psychosis. Frost comes to life and decides he is going to get Nixon to talk.

That phone call never took place. Nor, for that matter, did Frost succeed, as the film proposes, in cornering Nixon and forcing him to acknowledge the nature of his own criminality. Michael Sheen, who does a wonderful job as Frost, actually widens his eyes in shock when, in the midst of a question about Watergate, Nixon informs him, “When the president does it, it is not illegal.” But in the interview itself, as John Taylor of the Nixon Center has noted, Nixon used those words not in relation to Watergate but rather in a discussion of an aborted anti-domestic terrorism effort called the Huston plan, which he was likening to Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.

Nixon appears shattered when he says, as he did in the interview, “I let the American people down.” Frank Langella, the onetime matinee idol, is shot in extreme close-up as he speaks the words, which seem to emerge from his mouth almost unbidden, the result solely of Frost’s insistent questioning. Ridiculous. Nixon was anything but shattered during the interview or by the interview. Saying “I let the people down” was exactly Nixon’s way of refusing to answer specific questions about the nature of his role in the original crime and the cover-up. He allowed those answers to go to the grave with him, which certainly suggests he played a larger role than we will ever know now.

Even more breathtakingly false are the film’s closing captions, which attempt to place the interviews in historical context. According to those captions, Frost was celebrated around the world for his brilliant job, which transformed his career and made him into a wise man of the medium. Nixon, the captions suggest, never recovered from the damage done to him by the interview.

Now this is comic. Frost did little of note after the interview, while Nixon underwent the most unlikely and unexpected rehabilitation of any political figure in history. He wrote a series of bestsellers, was consulted by Republicans and Democrats alike, and received a grand funeral upon his death during which he was eulogized by five presidents. He had come full circle, and the first stop on his path to rehabilitation was the interview with David Frost.

“You were a worthy adversary,” Nixon tells Frost in a parting moment at the end of the film. No, actually, Frost wasn’t, and among the many strange features of Frost/Nixon–notably the wildly unconvincing performance of the still-gorgeous and plummy-voiced Frank Langella–the strangest is its attempt to transform a skilled television presenter into a slayer of presidents when anyone alive today who was paying attention 30 years ago knows that isn’t what happened at all.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.