The Last Movie I Saw

Last night I went to see Frost/Nixon directed by Ron Howard and starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in the title roles. I have to give Howard and Langella credit-- they manage to create a humanistic portrait of Nixon without soft-pedaling the nature or effect of his crimes. To put it another way, the film could have just conformed to a particular take on the disgraced president-- either chopping him down completely (which is more or less how I remember Robert Altman's Secret Honor) or creating a false sense of human frailty, as opposed to hubris (which is how I recall Anthony Hopkins' portrayal in Oliver Stone's Nixon*). Howard's film allows for a degree of sympathy while fully acknowledging Nixon's hand in his own ultimate defeat, and makes it pretty clear that such human-level sympathy hardly exonerates him from blame for his transgressions. I don't think the film stands up as a great film, mainly because the first half is a bit tedious in providing exposition for the showdown between David Frost and Nixon in the famous interviews that took place a few years after the latter's resignation. But once the interviews begin, the movie gathers momentum and makes up for the shortcomings in the first part. Special kudos to Oliver Platt, playing a somewhat quintessential Oliver Platt role as one of Frost's colleagues; he always brings something entertaining to the plate, much in the tradition of the great character actors of the past. I also liked Sam Rockwell as James Reston, but maybe only because his was the character that most represented my perspective of Nixon going in to the film.

*I haven't seen either Secret Honor or Nixon since they were first released, so it's possible my memory of each is off. Maybe I'll try to hunt them up on video to see if I'd still read them this way.