After the long drive yesterday, we sat down to watch “Frost/Nixon.” Tired as I was, I doubted I’d make it all the way through, but it was riveting. Michael Sheen seems to have quite a career going playing real-life figures from recent history (he’s known for his portrayals of Tony Blair in both “The Queen” and “The Deal.” I gave both those films four stars in the Netflix rating system, and now I’ve done the same for “Frost/Nixon.” Frank Langella is of course lugubriously fascinating as a Nixon more nixonian than the original.
In fact, if there’s anything that’s a letdown it’s the realization, when you watch the supplementary material on the DVD, that the original interviews weren’t as colorful or dramatic. In fact, the original Nixon was cooler, and less interesting, than Langella’s version.
You might also find James Reston Jr.’s over-the-top liberal hostility to Nixon tiresome, but it’s a pretty fair representation of the way a lot of people felt and acted at the time. And Ron Howard effectively made fun of that excessiveness with the bit when Reston meekly shakes hands with the president, right after insisting he’d do no such thing.
It’s also very interesting as an evocation of a time I’d almost forgotten. You have to remind yourself watching this just how remarkable it was for the worlds of entertainment and politics to overlap this way back before 24/7 TV “news.” It really took me back to those days, when I was a copy boy at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis the night of Nixon’s resignation, and the managing editor sent me to the composing room to have them blow up the words “Nixon Resigns” as big as it would go across the whole front page — back in a time when that sort of flash in print was also unusual.
Anyway, I enjoyed it, and recommend it.
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I haven’t seen it yet but will try to now with your recommendation. (I watch very few movies these days with 2 little ones to care for.) I’m barely old enough to remember the time before infotainment and still I miss it.
I voted for Nixon but with reservations. I never quite trusted the man and when the information started coming out about the activities surrounding his inner circle, my instincts proved to be correct.
I have no desire to watch a Hollywood version of events. I followed them daily and watched the David Frost interviews when they aired. History has a way of not being retold accurately or truthfully. It is shaped to fit the writer’s viewpoint.
Nixon was an embarassment. Period.
Vietnam was the Democrats’ war. They started it, they escalated it, they lost it, and they have been trying to rewrite history ever since.
Nixon ran in 1968 on a platform of ending the war in a staged withdrawal. Democrats, with the help of $2,000,000 a year in KGB cash, encouraged students to demonstrate from the moment Nixon was swept into office, as if he had started the war. When Nixon beat far leftie George McGovern in a landslide, the left went beserk. This movie is propaganda to feed to the generations who were not there viewing the original non-event of the Frost interview.
I voted for McGovern (yeah, I’m the guy who did that…). But it wasn’t an easy choice.
It was my first-ever time voting, and the experience foreshadowed many others. I actually stood there in the booth trying to make up my mind, and it took awhile (more than once in my voting career, I’ve had a poll worker say, “Sir? Do you need any help?”). McGovern had run a disaster of a campaign; I had thought Eagleton had been the best thing he had going, until he dumped him. I was pretty well convinced that he’d be a disastrous president. And I was never really an antiwar type. (Nixon’s Cambodian incursion, which was treated as something we all know to have been horrible in the movie, always sort of made sense to me — I mean, it was where the enemy was hiding, right?)
But the thing McGovern had said about when it came down to it your conscience just wouldn’t let you vote for Nixon worked on me. Standing there, I couldn’t do it. I was convinced, even as early as that was, that he was dirty on Watergate.
So I voted the first of many protest votes. I voted for McGovern just to express my objections to Nixon. But if there had been any chance McGovern could have won, I wouldn’t have let myself pull the lever for him, either.
And so I began my many years of dissatisfaction with both parties. Which, as I’ve mentioned many times, is what made 2008 so different — the two party nominees were both guys I liked. That’s the ONLY time that’s ever happened. I could have voted for either McCain or Obama, and it was wonderful.
I wonder if that will ever happen again?
Lee’s assessment is on the money. This was a Democrat war. I know, I am probably one of the few on this blog who remembers the sabres of war being rattled in Democrat halls, not Republicans. When Kennedy was shot, he was on the verge of withdrawing from Vietnam. The rest is history or shall we say with accuracy, revisionist history.
The exact reason I will not, under any circumstances, watch the crap disguised as history.