Frost/Nixon

An oddity, this one. A film about a television interview. OK, so the clash between light entertainment presenter David Frost and disgraced former US President Richard Nixon is probably the most famous political interview there has ever been, but still... a whole film dedicated to an interview?

And in all honesty, it doesn't quite work. It falls into the trap of mixing fact and fiction. On the evening of the final interview - the one where Nixon famously declared "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal" in defence of his actions over Watergate - the film shows an entirely fictitious telephone call between Frost and a drunken Nixon which attempts to draw parallels between the former President and the TV chatshow host. To me, this is cheating... If you want to make a point about the supposed similarities between the two men, then I think you have to do it without inventing events like this.

More fundamentally, perhaps, I think this is an attempt to rewrite history. At the time of the interview, the consensus was the Frost had 'lost' this gladiatorial contest - that he never really was able to extract from Nixon anything approaching an admission, far less an apology. The way the film tells it, through fairly carefully selected editing of the interview footage (Sheen's Frost and Langella's Nixon do use the script of the original interview) you might think that Frost conclusively defeated Nixon. It simply wasn't so.

There are other niggles. I don't understand quite why it was thought a good idea to have the actors appear giving 'talking head' commentary on the subsequent impact of the events, as if this were a documentary rather than a drama. And Sheen's Frost often reminds me just a little too much of his Tony Blair. Though, to be fair, there was always something of the light entertainer about Blair.

Redeeming features? Well, Frank Langella deserved his Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the lugubrious, disgraced Nixon. And 1970s Britain and America are convincingly brought back to life. All the same, I came out thinking that this was a film that had little to say and that it is hard to understand quite how it ended up with a Best Picture nomination