he last of the big Oscar contenders to land on DVD this spring will be “Frost/Nixon,” April 21.
Until then, journalist David Frost will continue to reap the benefits of his 1977 gamble by filling that vacuum with the DVD release of the actual Frost/Nixon interviews.
It begs the question, since most people would probably only want to plunk down a few hours of their life, at most, on some 30-year-old television interview with a disgraced former president, what will it be – the real deal, or the Hollywood ending?
Despite the actual interviews being preserved for all to see, Ron Howard’s adaptation of the Tony award-winning play makes great and dramatic leaps from what Americans tuned in to see in four separate, syndicated broadcasts culled from dozens of hours of interview footage personally funded by Frost himself.
The most obvious and well-publicized departure is one of those moments that, when it occurs on-screen, you may hear yourself whisper, “this better have happened, or zombie Nixon has every right to sue.” It involves a drunken phone call between the two titular figures, during which Nixon almost seems to disregard the presence of another person on the line and just dives head-first into his pool of vendettas and insecurities.
It did and it didn’t happen. Nixon never called Frost, but he was known to drunk dial lucky members of the press corp now and then. While that’s the most glaring bit of fiction in the movie, it’s not the worst – and knowing why doesn’t take harvesting Wikipedia for useless trivia. Just take a look at the interviews themselves.
The best thing about them isn’t any divine revelation – except maybe that Nixon was unguarded enough to blurt out a line like “when the President does something, it’s not illegal!” After all, the public already knew Nixon was guilty. It didn’t need him to give a Clinton-esque fireside confession, since it already had actual tape of Nixon conspiring, backtracking, and outright bitching to his co-conspirators, thanks to the White House practice of recording telephone calls from the Kennedy-through-Nixon administrations. A large chunk of these conversations are in the public domain for all to hear.
Look at the real interviews, and you can see where the interest lies. It’s not a confession, as the “Frost/Nixon” film immediately posits and then attempts to show. Doing so depends on a script that clearly condenses and rephrases key passages, practically creating a “confession” out of thin air. In the interviews themselves, Nixon denies even the plainest of misdeeds, and admits only to the vague notion of having probably lied at some point (me too!) and to the even more obvious crime of having disappointed the American public.
No, the true fun in these interviews is similar to the thrill people got from watching Stephen Colbert turn the 2006 White House press corp dinner into the most ballsy, squirm-inducing piece of performance art George W. Bush ever participated in.
It’s watching Nixon shift his pants, wipe his lips, pout, smile awkwardly and generally look defeated throughout the long stretch of Watergate questioning.
It’s watching him go from full-scale denial, to trying to get off on a technicality and then finally resorting to sweet, simple pity. Twice, he describes crying at some point during the aftermath of Watergate, a shameless attempt at garnering audience sympathy – I wasn’t around to know if it worked at the time, but it seems to do the job on David Frost. His jaw droops closer and closer to the floor throughout the segment, and he’s suddenly speechless as Nixon concocts the non-answer of all non-answers.
There are a few points that should be made in defense of the dramatized version, aside from the fact that it’s shorter and much breezier to watch. The obvious one is that the two men playing Frost and Nixon are masters, Frank Langella’s being particularly haunting in capturing Nixon’s ability to be as smart as he was deeply troubled (not to mention Gargoyle-esque).
The other bright spot is that the film doesn’t rest on history, even if it endlessly hypes its twisted version of things. It is just as much a shot at profiling Nixon, while giving a big nod to the often under-appreciated art of interviewing powerful people, who even at their most dejected still have the chops, lawyers and aides necessary to make sure they can speak for hours on end without ever actually saying anything.
The Winner…
I’d go with the real thing, because unlike the film, it allows the viewer to interpret what’s going down; consider that Frost not only cut Nixon a hefty check to sit down for the interviews, a questionable journalistic practice, but also agreed to let him in on whatever profits resulted (a fact not disclosed in the film.) Where the movie pretends Nixon’s aides tried to whisk him away as his facade began to crack, in reality his handlers encouraged all of it.
But if you want to see the seeds of our current paradigm, where every high-profile fall from grace results in a dutiful march into high-octane, televised self-pity, accept no substitutes. Nixon’s the one!