Story: British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) hatches a plan to interview Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). As the plan takes longer and longer to come together, Frost struggles to come up with sponsors and a network, while his research team (Sam Rockwell, Matthew Macfadyen, and Oliver Platt) attempts to give Nixon the trial he never got.Finally, something with a little life! If you wanted to do a study about the decline of the middlebrow melodrama, Doubt, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon would be excellent places to start. Ron Howard is the quintessential middlebrow director after all.
Adapting his own play for the screen, Peter Morgan continues to corner the market on the inner lives of public figures of yesteryear and on Michael Sheen. Wherever Sheen's been hiding all these years (the stage, apparently), movies had better not give him back. He's so naturalistic that it's disarming.
Ah, Langella. How nice to see you again. You make Nixon vacillate wildly between sympathetic and callous, and always so naturally. First Starting Out in the Evening and now this! What a find you are!
The rest of the moive: meh. Too many talking heads explaining what anyone with eyes can clearly figure out for him- or herself (did they have those on stage, too?), too little reason for pointing out Diane Swayer (she gets two lines, and one comes from off-screen), too few women generally. It's not very exciting, but it is fun and strikes the right chords. It'll do. B+
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