The biggest thought in my mind (aside from how much I loved this movie and how incredible Michael Sheen and Frank Langella were and how glad I am that Ron Howard captured their incredible stage performance) is my curiosity regarding the human condition. Allow me to explain via ramble. The movie is framed around four taping sessions that David Frost paid Pesident Nixon 600,000 dollars for…you know…for the privilege of interviewing a former President. The story details a contract between Frost and Nixon that divides the subjects to be covered in the taping sessions so that Nixon can even-handedly justify his actions and talk about the good he did as President. The contract goes so far as to specify that Watergate is only to be covered in the last taping session, which proves to be the most dramatic interview of the four. In the first three interviews, Frost is bowled over by Nixon’s rambling, homey, folky yarns and barely gets a word in edgewise. But before the fourth taping session, Frost finally does his homework and goes toe-to-toe with Richard M. Nixon and confronts him about his actions as President; giving the American people the conviction they felt Nixon avoided by resigning. What I wonder is: how much of the contract is real? If it was, was it really constructed in such a way that most of the interviews were pithy and lacking in monument until the bombshell fourth interview? Did real events (i.e. the construction of the contract between David Frost and President Nixon) lend themselves to drama? Or was it dramatically structured that way for the stage play and thusly the movie? Just curious…
Fantastic flick. Absolutely amazing performances.