A Great Performance in a Slick Entertainment for Grownups
Frost/Nixon (2008) was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Actor (Frank Langella) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Morgan). An engrossing, smart drama, the film is just about perfectly crafted, and Frank Langella turns in a virtuoso performance.
Originally, Frost/Nixon was a play written by Peter Morgan. After a successful run in London, it moved to Broadway, and at both venues Langella portrayed disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon and Michael Sheen played internationally known TV talk-show host David Frost. When director-producer Ron Howard and writer Morgan transposed the play to the screen, Langella and Sheen reprised their roles.
After Nixon became enmeshed in scandal, he was widely reviled and resigned the presidency in 1974. But the movie isn't so much about politics as it is about a television show watched by millions. In 1977 Frost interviewed the ex-President on TV, and the behind-the-scenes details about the making of this show are fascinating. The sequences in the film depicting the interview sessions are riveting, showing us a battle of wits between two very different men, each of whom is expert at using TV to make himself look good and adversaries look bad.
Howard and Morgan did a brilliant job in adapting the play to the screen, and the acting is topnotch. The movie is involving while you're watching it, but it doesn't rattle around in the brain much after it's over. Ultimately, Frost/Nixon is a dramatization of a footnote to history. Nevertheless, it is superior, sophisticated entertainment.
DVD Bonus Materials
The best DVD extra is the feature-length audio commentary by director-producer Ron Howard. Before Howard made big-budget movies like A Beautiful Mind (2001) and The Da Vinci Code (2006), he had tons of experience in television, which is at heart what Frost/Nixon is all about. At one point in his commentary, Howard characterizes this movie in classical terms: Frost is the protagonist, and Nixon is the antagonist. Howard also mentions that the budget was so low he had to shoot actors in Marina del Rey, California, but make it appear they were in Sydney, Australia. Interestingly enough, he was allowed to do three days of shooting at La Casa Pacifica, Nixon's beachfront villa in San Clemente, California.
The DVD also contains almost an hour of video bonus materials. Perhaps the most interesting is the six-minute visit to the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, where the executive director, a Nixon loyalist, makes the dubious claim that Vietnam and Watergate are intrinsically related. The remainder of the extras are pretty standard fare. There's a 23-minute making-of, in which the real-life David Frost appears briefly, and we learn that he is now formally referred to using the title "Sir." There are also seven deleted scenes with a total runtime of over 22 minutes. And finally, there's the seven-and-one-half-minute "The Real Interview," in which crew and cast make the case that the movie's reenactment of the Frost-Nixon interview is faithful to what aired on TV in May of 1977.
DVD Details
Below I have listed all the details for the Frost/Nixon DVD.
Release Date: April 21, 2009
Feature Film Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for Some Language
Widescreen (2.35:1), Color
English Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1
French Dolby Digital 5.1
English Captioned for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Spanish Subtitles
French Subtitles
Audio Commentary by Director Ron Howard
The Making of Frost/Nixon (23 min.)
The Real Interview (7 1/2 min.)
The Nixon Library (6 min.)
Deleted Scenes (7 segments, total runtime = 22 1/2 min.)
