Frost/Nixon: B+

Peter Morgan, who wrote Frost/Nixon, may very well be a great writer—a great playwright (he wrote the original play), a great screenwriter (and now the cinematic adaptation), a great dramatist, period. And it’s a curious thing, his greatness, as it comes at no expense to his storytelling. In the combined field of stage and screen that contains such voluble, densely eloquent (or else tersely clever) writers as David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, and Charlie Kaufman, it is most strange indeed to find that talent who finds greatness without talking himself into circles. Morgan does just that; and as an extension of his cleanly witty dialogue, his narratives are similarly created: propulsive, but elegant—minimal, but never spare. Above all, his works are always most entertaining—most thrilling—for the way they link the audience into the character’s struggles for validation, for security, and (most often) for power.

Frost/Nixon, which Ron Howard directs with a casual mastery of internal-external staging, both enlivening and expanding the original’s theatrical dynamics, is no exception. It is, ostensibly, about more than just an interview: it’s also about the lives of the two men who made history some thirty years ago when one, David Frost (Michael Sheen), decided to question the other, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), for nearly thirty hours. Yet their lives are of no real importance, and in cinematic context it fleshes them out none as characters (the fleshing out is all left to their actors, who have an ease and mastery of projection that, one supposes, is only granted after years of performance). So when the interviewing actually begins a little more than an hour in, well, that’s truly when the movie begins too, more—it practically jumps to life, with Howard’s camera volleying back and forth as if watching a tennis match with missiles instead of balls.

Morgan has great fun sizing up and exploring the capabilities of his central, centrally opposed, forces; and his director has great fun in interweaving clips from the “present” to not only date the movie, but give it a sort of reverberated-in-hindsight relevance. So well is the visual and verbal layered together, with such verve and momentum, that what may occasionally seem urbane in Morgan’s script begins to sizzle with life…and the wounded vanities that hide beneath it.

Kudos to Langella and Sheen—who relish their battle by giving perfectly edited-down performances that are adorned neither with flamboyance or melodrama; and who, because of that, give a center to the dramatization spinning about them. It doesn’t have quite the bite, either psychological or social, of Morgan’s The Queen. But Frost/Nixon is a perfect lesson in the essence of nuts-and-bolts storytelling: it speaks (smartly, persuasively) for itself.