Film

Teens have Twilight, but it looks like the real vampires have just arrived. In their famous 1977 interview, David Frost and Richard Nixon both had bloodsucking in mind—a thirst for media vitality that’s the theme of Peter Morgan’s play and, now, a terrific, wonky film version that actually improves upon it. The background: Frost (Sheen, the delicate Tony Blair from The Queen) is a haircut riding on easy charm and chatting with key world figures like the Bee Gees. Still, he sees the astronomical numbers for Nixon’s televised resignation and wants in. Meanwhile, Nixon (Langella), “retired” in California, seizes on the interview as a way back into the political arena. They meet, and the ex-President calls it a duel, with the confidence of a lion licking its chops. Who the ultimate victor was says more about our modern appetites than anyone knew at the time.

Ron Howard, never an intellectual director, understands this material completely. He’s a bit of a Frost himself—that’s not a slam—and as he opens the play up cinematically, re-creating Nixon on the steps of his helicopter peering directly into the lens to meet Frost’s gaze on the other side of the world, you see that Howard is actually shooting a love story. Passions for justice and dignity linger on the periphery in expanded roles for enraged researcher James Reston Jr. (Rockwell) and Nixon aide Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon, superb), but centrally this is a tale of sympathy, a gift that perhaps only a TV host would think to extend. Frost/Nixon is about the belated awakening of a guilty conscience; as such, it feels a touch too late to today’s hopeful moment. (It’s the best film of 2006.) But to luxuriate in Langella’s magnificent performance—as a man unable to small-talk, unable to pet a dachshund convincingly, who can feel only privately—is to appreciate how movies can ennoble even the worst of us.