Trivial Matters

Finally, I got to see this movie. I had to drive clear across town (in the snow as it turned out) to find a theater playing it. One would think that for all of the press it has been getting, and all of the talent involved (Ron Howard, Frank Langella, Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, and Oliver Platt to name a few) that it would be getting many more screens in Portland.

But anyway…

The film opens with actual news footage about Watergate, leading into the resignation speech (I kinda hoped for a cameo by Ben Stein). The first half of the movie is the setup for the interviews. Frost is presented as a playboy push-over who was going to softball Nixon, all the while trying to sell it as the most important interview of all time.

I was a bit dissapointed that there was not much exposition on the Watergate scandal beyond what most people know. I was born during the Reagan administration, and only know what happened from history books. And you could tell from the movie that there was a popular hatred of Nixon, but it is never justified or explained fully.

Knowing that this was based on a play, I tried to picture each scene as if it were being on a stage. The only parts that were lost on me were the “interviews” with Frost’s research team and Nixon’s Chief of Staff that were scattered throughout the movie. (I thought of the show Life in that they are the same style of post-event interviews.) At first it seemed like they were interviewing the actual persons being portrayed, which I think would have been a better move, but I quickly recognized the actors.

As far as the acting goes, Rockwell was over-used and Platt was under-used. Langella and Michael Sheen both give great performances, but never at the same time. In fact, the whole movie was jumpy in the sense that only one actor at a time was able to shine. Perhaps it was intentional, but the idea of an “ensamble” cast doesn’t work if they can’t act together.

Also, too much focus was on Frost’s girlfriend. At times, I expected her to be a spy for Nixon or something, but in the end she was just someone in the background who got way too much screen time. (Maybe if they had said the two got married or something in the “afterward” text before the credits, their relationship might have actually meant something, but I guess she was a fictional creation of sorts.)

Altogether, it is a decent movie. I’ll have to see if I can find the original interviews to watch and compare. I didn’t know that Diane Sawyer was working for Nixon at the time, which was an interesting twist that they didn’t play up at all (at least I found it interesting). I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tries to do something similar with Dubya in the next few years.