Frost/Nixon

In 1977, Nixon gave an interview to David Frost, during which he made some
startling admissions of guilt which he never fully lived down, and effectively
put the last nail in the coffin of his reputation, and cemented the suffix
-gate as a byword for crooked political shenanigans. At the time, however,
Frost was very much a star on the wane, with precious little journalistic
reputation. The film examines how this all came about.

What makes the story interesting is what it *isn't*. It is not the story of a
noble, crusading journalist taking down a crooked politician. It's the tale of
two egotistical, shallow men, both of whom *need* to win the confrontation in
order to salvage their careers; obscurity beckons for Frost if he loses, the
political wilderness for Nixon.

Frank Lagella paints a very human picture of Nixon, as a man whose ego and
temper brought him low, and continue to bring him low. Michael Sheen paints
Frost as a shallow mask of a man, a grin with very little substance behind it -
plenty of brains but practically no motives beyond his own comfort. If you
didn't know he was a good actor, you might easily think that it was his
performance that was at fault, rather than it being a pretty brutal assessment
of David Frost's shallowness.

Ultimately, I don't know that there's actually that much of a story to be told
here. The detail is interesting enough, but there's just a couple of really key
scenes here, and quite a bit of padding.