Oscar/Howard
"To be perfectly honest, Dave, I feel that you're framing my response a bit by asking if I 'do bad things because I'm an evil Republican.'"
It’s hard not to admire Ron Howard on a superficial level. The man parlayed success as a child actor into a resilient career as a director of popular entertainment; every couple years, he comes out with a new film that is either a prospective blockbuster (The Da Vinci Code, Ransom, Splash, even EdTV probably seemed like a good idea when it was in the script stage) or a prestige production (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind). To put it another way, Howard alternates between pablum and Oscar bait.1
While having money and a good sense for what people want doesn’t necessarily make one a real artist, Howard is a sturdy, if unremarkable craftsman. His biggest talent is probably getting great ensemble performances out of high-powered casts. Not for nothing does “a Ron Howard film” carry a certain amount of weight with audiences and critics. Even in a piece of junk like Da Vinci Code, Sir Ian McKellan shone ever so brightly. Yet no actor, however great, can overcome a terrible script or an inattentive director.
Howard isn’t a “good” director, but he’s great with actors. That’s probably why critics are being so kind to Frost/Nixon: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Sam Rockwell, and Kevin Bacon all get plum roles, and go to town with them. Langella is certainly a more compelling Richard Nixon than Anthony Hopkins.2 He’s cagey, desperate, suave (!), detestable, pathetic, witty, and looms over the film, casting a shadow like torrential rain. He even gets one of those Oscar-nabbing monologues that culminates in Nixon spitting out the profanity, “those motherfuckers,” with such damaged, vulnerable pride that the tenuousness of the scene’s plausibility is smoothed over by Langella’s nom-nomming of the scenery, cloaked in shadow and soaked in alcohol. All the while, Sheen listens, a flurry of emotions and thoughts clicking away behind those wide eyes — empathy, pity, fear, contempt, self-recognition… who knows? David Frost’s name comes first on the diptych, but Nixon’s the marketable moniker. Who gives a crap about some has-been British talk show host whose biggest claim to fame is the series of interviews dramatized in this film?3
Sheen’s greatest accomplishment is that he doesn’t give you an overt reason to care. His Frost is just this side of a carpetbagger — a slick operator with a sexy accent (to us Americans, anyway) and a winning smile. His typically-vacuous expression is ideal for television, a perfect blank screen onto which his target demographic can project anything it desires. Peter Morgan’s screenplay draws heavy-handed parallels between the widely-disliked Nixon and the likable Frost in terms of their complementary desires to be liked. It’s easier for Frost because instead of power, he simply wants fame. Fame is no easier to come by, but the moral stakes aren’t (ostensibly) as high as clawing your way into the Oval Office. Nobody cares if a quasi-celeb lies or bullies his way into the public sphere. Stars — especially pseudo-stars — fade, but the commander-in-chief’s impact lingers decades afterward. It takes Frost quite a while to realize how symbiotic the relationship is between the quasi-celebrity conduits and the people in office, but when it hits him like the proverbial bullet train (during Nixon’s little monologue about how similar he and Frost are, as if they were old sparring partners with a long and storied career4), the transformative effect is commanding but subtle. The balance of power shifts, and it is because Sheen the actor manages to take that power from the heavy-hitter Langella that Nixon becomes (yet again) a tragic figure. Even in a film structured around his legendary trickiness and ethical failings, a breezy, British media entrepreneur sneaks in and steals his thunder without so much as a profanity-laced soliloquy.
Of course, Sheen has Sam Rockwell on his side. Rockwell is shaping up to be one of the best actors working right now; his versatility is nothing short of stunning. His role is essentially one-note, but Rockwell plays it with all the pieces of a full-bodied orchestra, bringing an energy and righteous fury to bear, in order to balance out Nixon’s self-righteous indignation where Frost is not suited to counter it.
Even a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy must periodically stop to partake of a lightly-seared soufflé and freshly-squeezed orange juice to fortify its relentless constitution.
Howard is smart to not get in the way of his actors. He never does. (Almost never.) But as strong as his ensemble is, his aesthetic style is entirely unsuited to the material. (As usual.) His production crew faithfully evokes the atmosphere and bric-a-brac of an era three decades in the past, but his gaze is not detail-oriented, and even his powerhouse actors exist in an actorly plane a mere redshift apart from the authentic period sets. When Morgan’s screenplay mentions a motif involving shoes, Howard and his editors, Daniel Hanley and Mike Hill, judiciously insert close-ups of designer shoes. When the actors act the hell out of their dialogue, the camera dutifully follows them about the screen, keeping the primary speakers carefully in view so the audience doesn’t get confused. During heated Frost/Nixon exchanges, Howard and cinematographer Salvatore Totino do their best to give us visual whiplash. And the obligatory Hans Zimmer score overplays its aural hand in virtually every scene, nicking bits from John Williams’ work on JFK and almost every film Philip Glass has ever worked on. Ingredients like these don’t need to be juggled by the deft hand of a gourmet chef; they can be dumped in a blender alongside several million dollars, pureed, and served in a milkshake glass, replete with a candy-striped bendy straw. It tastes sweet enough, but it can sit in your gut like a lump of hot lead.
For a film that not-so-humbly posits itself as a battle of titans (a conceit that Sheen doesn’t seem to buy into, even as Langella bustles through his poses like Cassius Clay spoiling to mix it up with Sonny Liston), it comes off as surprisingly inauspicious. Here’s the story of how President Richard Nixon finally got his unofficial “conviction,” but Howard handles it like he would a chamber drama about two rivals competing for the hand of the same woman. After spending gawd-knows-how-many decades in the business,5 you’d think Howard would know how to mine his material more productively than that.
In the wake of an historic presidential election, following nearly a decade under the leadership of a president considered by many to be one of our country’s worst, in an age where multimedia journalism is mired in a firestorm of questions about responsibility, pandering, editorial oversight, and corporate ownership, Frost/Nixon should have been one of the most political films of the year. It didn’t have to be unambiguous. But it functions so much as a showcase for one showboat performance (a great one nonetheless) and a bevy of more internalized considerations that it never engages politics in a meaningful way, unless it is taking potshots at a dead crook, whose fate the film laments, even as it sets him up as a straw man for everything that’s wrong with politics. Like Nixon, the film wants to have it all — even to cheat a bit while doing it — and be well-liked for the effort.
Regardless of the professionalism of the performances — including the crew, each member of which seems to be “acting” his/her part for the sake of the stupefied audience rather than just doing it — I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation while watching Frost/Nixon that it was indeed following in Tricky Dick’s sad footsteps: angling for the top slot, the Academy Award, by the most disingenuous means necessary. Perhaps it isn’t outright deception and thievery; perhaps there are simply mistakes being made. Even so, where does that leave us? With a film trying to nab a few statues by pretending to be about Big, Important Stuff, coasting on the shoulders of hardworking men and women with the moxie to just maybe pull off the heist. Welcome to Oscargate 2009. Cast your ballots, and don’t leave any hanging chads.
Edited by Tracy McCusker.
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- I’m being generous. Many critics would agree that what passes for Oscar bait these days is pablum, only with a whiff of pretension. ↩
- Which is saying something. I love Hopkins, and I quite liked Oliver Stone’s film. ↩
- I’m probably not being quite fair. I’d never really heard of David Frost until I heard about this movie, though presumably people who came of age during the mid-70s were familiar with him. My own limited experience is not a terribly reliable barometer for such things, but it is worth disclosing that nobody I know had ever mentioned the man once, to my recollection, in the 26 years I’ve been alive. Perhaps that only goes to show my lack of education and/or the extent to which I’ve been sheltered. Or it could be that the “public conviction” at the center of Frost/Nixon’s plot had virtually no impact on the president’s — and America’s — legacy, one way or the other. My esteemed Playtime colleague, David Nguyen-Tri, provided me a link to this article discussing the film’s basis in reality, as well as some context for the real-life interviews. ↩
- Which, come to think of it, is how the film presents them. Perhaps Morgan is more in league with his incarnation of Nixon than we are initially led to believe… ↩
- To be precise, fifty years this year since his first screen credit in Anatole Litvak’s Yul Brenner/Deborah Kerr romance, The Journey. ↩
Matt, you mention the banality of the editing / production style, but don’t you find that this style is suited to the psuedo-documentary style of the entire affair? Howard’s been tweaking this psuedo-documentary form since “Arrested Development,” and I think that his efforts to create a kind of “true history” out of a fictionalized true history deserves mention. You mention that ” handles it like he would a chamber drama about two rivals competing for the hand of the same woman” — but isn’t that what Frost and Nixon are trying to do? Compete for the hand of the viewing audience? While Frost/Nixon are imagined as rivals here, the complicity of the the two trying to claw their way back into the limelight does smack a bit of a Romance, where our hero-knights must undergo trials in order to win their place at the table from which they’ve been exiled.
I’m rambling a bit, but the point I want to make is that Howard techniques try to walk this very fine line between documentary of “true history” and the layers of fictionalization that have been overlayed –- and I think that Howard manages to achieve, through his workmanlike ethic, a measure of (perhaps undeserved) authenticity that other historical / political pieces don’t attain.
As to the film’s lack of political message; I found the comparisons between Vietnam / Cambodia very telling as to the Afghanistan / Iraq situation of today. In fact, I think an argument could be made that the schaudenfreude & tragedy that we feel for Nixon is our collective hangover from Bush, who will never make such pronouncements—-and whom isn’t intelligent or self-effacing enough to ever be painted with such fine strokes.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Liles! I’m not sure I agree that the film is anything like a documentary. The photography is too gauzy and free-floating for that. It’s also not significantly different from his approach to any of his films. Everything from Apollo 13 to Da Vinci Code was shot the same way. I think Howard only knows one way to make films, and sometimes it’s better-suited to the material than others. I’m also not sure he was aiming for a sophisticated layering of True vs. “true” history — as I said, I think he was just telling the story as scripted, and if Morgan is aiming higher, Howard somehow missed it. Just because Howard is a workmanlike director doesn’t mean his approach accidentally coincided with the material; I think that’s a bit of a stretch. There’s no authenticity to this film, apart from the emotions the actors bring to it — and their approach is too theatrical to fly as anything other than psychological realism. Rockwell plays it more “real” than the rest of them, and that suits his character as well. That’s no accident, but I credit Rockwell more than anyone else with that artistic choice.
With the romantic rival comparison, I think there, too, if Howard is making seductive overtures to the audience, that torpedoes any attempt at an independently layered pseudo-historical approach. My main point is that if Frost/Nixon is an overture to the Oscar voting crowd, it’s a disingenuous one that sacrifices integrity for easy points. None of the film really hangs together outside of the performances, and they aren’t captured in a way that feels vital to the film; rather, the film feels like a window display for the performances, and not a remarkable one at that. The idea of rivalry is fine, but the stakes aren’t very high, despite the reminders that it’s a Big, Important Battle of Wits. The film posits that this was a huge moment for these men, and it never feels like that. It feels like the filmmakers really, really want us to believe it is, but don’t know how to convince us in cinematic terms. Either they’re competing for their images, or they’re competing against each other — that’s a dichotomy the film sets up, but never allows for a balance between the two, or reconciles which one was ultimately more important. Nixon lost on both counts, apparently, but only because the film pins all its hopes on the Watergate moment that was so forced in its staging that it was a huge anticlimax.
As far as the Vietnam/Cambodia comparisons, I think the film tries to avoid making explicit parallels. This is a movie that could have been made at any time — nothing about its presentation makes it unique to the current situation, and I don’t think it’s perceptive or nuanced enough to be perennially relevant to geopolitics. Nixon will probably always be a compelling figure on the page because after more than thirty years, we still don’t quite know what to do with him. He’s a boogeyman who’s constantly undergoing a process of faux-humanization by filmmakers that seem to want to make him complex and empathetic, even as they re-mythologize him to their liking. In this case, his competitive spirit makes him a broken-down echo of Daniel Plainview, except he isn’t surrounded with the aesthetic brio brought to bear by P.T. Anderson.
The more I think about it, I think Bush and Nixon are two very different animals, despite the thematic similarities — which could have been exploited, but weren’t — and I’d maybe filmmakers should present perspectives on Bush rather than filter him through the tarnished lens of Richard Nixon. That may be part of the problem, too. There’s all this stuff that could have been done, but wasn’t, and maybe that’s because the film isn’t really timely after all. It just seems that way because maybe we’re thirsty for a perceptive commentary on American politics and executive responsibility, and Nixon is so big a figure, it’s hard not to imprint him upon the present. In any case, Frost/Nixon didn’t speak to me on any level apart from a half-baked bid for credibility that was only lent by the talent and skill of the performers.
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