David Frost (Michael Sheen) is a jet-setting television personality trying to make his mark when he lands an interview with Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), whose legacy was on the line.

Ralph Nelson

If you think a two-hour movie about a couple of middle-aged men sitting around talking would be deadly dull, Ron Howard will prove how wrong you are in his riveting Frost/Nixon.

Howard’s film, based on the hit Broadway play, is more than just a recounting of the three hourlong television interviews British TV host David Frost held with former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon in the spring of 1977, less than three years after Nixon had resigned the presidency.

The Academy Award-winning director dazzles. He creates excitement where one might never expect to find it. He finds laughs in the most unexpected places. He builds tension as Frost desperately tries to woo Nixon into agreeing to sit down with him. But then that’s only the start of his problems.

Peter Morgan, who based the script on his successful play, does for both David Frost and Richard Nixon what he did for Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen and Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, showing their fragile human sides and giving them a measure of sympathy. You may still not like Nixon at the end of Frost/Nixon, but you will understand some of the pressures that made him do what he did.

Frank Langella, who won the 2007 Tony Award for playing Nixon in the Broadway production and has been nominated for a Golden Globe best actor award for this film, has the whispery, deep and slightly gravelly voice of the president down to perfection. He may not look exactly like Nixon, but close enough, with the hunched over shoulders that make him look weary and sad. He also has the never-say-die feistiness of Nixon, his smartness and his cleverness. Oddly, one sort of grows to like Nixon, or at least appreciate him in the context of the film. In the wistful, dreamy final moments of Howard’s film, you may feel empathy.

Michael Sheen, who played British Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen, makes a brash, go-getter Frost. He’s a perpetual optimist, sunnily brushing off the worries of his staff when the first two Nixon sessions go poorly, buckling down in research to pull the interviews out of the fire.

Both men saw the televised interviews as their last best hope.

Nixon, who welcomed the challenge, felt Frost was a lightweight who would toss him softball questions. He saw the interviews as an opportunity to burnish his image with the American public, to give him a chance “to put the record straight and prove the Nixon years weren’t all bad.”

Frost, whose talk shows in Australia and Britain were facing the ax, saw the interviews as an opportunity to rejuvenate his career and make a name for himself in the important American TV market. “Think of the numbers we would get,” he burbles, a ratings goal that was more important to him at the time than trying to get Nixon to admit his guilt and to apologize to the American public for Watergate and his bombing of Cambodia in an escalation of the Vietnam War.

Although Nixon feared that an interview with a British TV talk show host who was unknown at the time to most Americans would not have the same gravitas of one he had been offered with Mike Wallace, money ruled out. Frost, in what was condemned as “checkbook journalism,” offered Nixon $2.5 million for the sessions. And the penny-counting Nixon, in what becomes sort of the film’s running gag, cagily milked Frost for as much money as he could get out of him.

But Frost didn’t actually yet have all the money he was offering Nixon. The American TV networks had turned down his broadcast offer because they did not pay interviewees. The fast-paced first third of the film revolves around Frost’s schemes and his increasingly frantic attempts to get the money, even after the first interview session has been completed.

Although he thinks he’s prepared, Frost finds a formidable opponent in Nixon, who relishes the interviews and sees them as a boxing title fight. Nixon agrees to no-holds-barred questioning, although his contract stipulates a set formula in which specific parts of his career are to be brought up in a specific session. But in an attempt to rattle Nixon, Frost goes hard line from the start with a tough and unexpected question. Nixon is clearly taken off guard, but then recovers and deftly deflects the question — and all of Frost’s follow-ups — with rambling anecdotes that leave Frost with a bewildered, deer-in-the-headlights gaze. Langella makes Nixon a formidable, self-assured opponent who can make a stirring comeback even after devastating pictures of the destruction he had engineered in Cambodia.

It’s only later, when Nixon makes a strange nighttime phone call to Frost (something invented for the film although it defines the ex-president), that we get to see Nixon’s human side. He turns the call into a soliloquy, laying out his lifetime feelings of inadequacy and his never-ending attempts to win the respect of people whom he believes feel they are better than he. It’s a devastating, soul-baring moment that’s handled beautifully by Langella. And it leads to a surprising punch line later in the film.

Howard creates tension as one wonders whether Frost will ever be able to turn what looks like a sinking endeavor into the televised high drama he had hoped. As the film goes along and these two go head to head, made alive with quick back and forth cuts between them, one gets caught up in the drama. Frost, a man who has tossed everything he had into the interviews, including his own money, becomes a sympathetic figure as he sees himself teetering on the precipice, ready to fall over.

It’s not just Frost and Nixon who make the film so fascinating. Kevin Bacon gives a solid supporting performance as Nixon’s faithful and protective aide Jack Brennan, something of a mother hen who offers comfort. Good, too, are Oliver Platt (looking camera ready for the role of Buddy Cianci if Michael Corrente’s The Prince of Providence film ever gets made) and Sam Rockwell as Frost’s advisers who prod him and bicker with him over the outcome of each interview. Rockwell’s James Reston Jr., who hates Nixon and sees the interviews as a chance to give him the trial he never had, has an amusing, awkward moment upon being introduced to Nixon. It’s something that underscores the celebrity and respect that Nixon, whom many thought of as the underhanded “Tricky Dick,” still could command.

Howard begins the film with newsreel footage about the Watergate break-in that brought Nixon down, the congressional Watergate hearings, Nixon’s resignation. It’s a shorthand view of history, but it’s necessary to give those in the audience who weren’t born when the events transpired a look into the past and a background for understanding why the meeting between Frost and Nixon came about.

*****Frost/Nixon

Starring: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones, Matthew Macfadyen, Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell.

Rated: R, contains adult themes, profanity, nudity.

mjanuson@projo.com