Frost/Nixon

Kathleen and I saw the Ron Howard movie, Frost/Nixon, this past Saturday night. Being a political junkie and a Nixon buff, I had looked forward to it since I heard about it, and hoped it would be true to the original interview (which I had actually never seen start-to-finish). I really enjoyed the movie! I'm not sure what I expected, but a lot of the movie was actually about the difficulties that David Frost had in pulling it off - financing it, selling it to a broad cast network, selling advertising, etc. Most of that apparently fell on him, and until the last session of taping (the Watergate discussion) he was very unprepared to face Nixon, who was a master of obfuscation and misdirection. I've since watched a couple of youtube clips of the real interview, and everything is really accurate - the timing, the expressions, etc. About the only critical thing I could see was that Frank Langella - while he did a great Nixon from the posture, the expressions and the language - looked older and more frail than Nixon did at the time.

I've since noticed that a DVD of the original interview was released on December 8, 2008 (strange, I assume that was done on purpose) that I probably need to buy. The movie had minimal interview scenes, so I would like the see the entire 90 minutes or so together.

The Kevin Bacon character in the movie mentioned something that I have always felt - that Nixon's downfall really overrode all of the great things he accomplished in his Presidency - getting us out of Vietnam, detente with the Soviet Union (which really hastened their downfall), the opening of relations with China (which also heavily impacted the USSR), etc. He was a brilliant but flawed man for sure. I'm glad that he was rehabilitated a bit before he died.