I was at the wheel of my car, heading west on the Massachusetts Pike. Fifteen minutes earlier I'd pulled out of the parking lot of the sprawling AMC movie palace in Framingham. The complex was wedged between the giant consumer meccas known as Shoppers World and the Natick Mall, the latter being the most elaborate and opulent monument to American purchasing power that I had ever seen (map). It had been a long drive to get there, but it was the nearest theater showing Frost/Nixon I could find that day.
On the outside of the multiplex, the neon sign for the "AMC Grille" had announced that this was no ordinary theater complex, but one with amenities. On the inside the most obvious feature was the extra-long concession counter that seemed to go on forever in either direction. The "Grille" turned out to be a set of restaurant-like tables off to the side with its own concession area, which was closed at this hour of the late afternoon on a weekday.
The biggest surprise was that the auditoriums were not stadium-seating. They must have just missed this innovation when the complex was built. Instead the seats were the normal fold-up types on a shallow pitch. It felt almost like a let-down, given the outward appearance of the complex.
The two-hour movie had flown by. I had enjoyed it at nearly every turn, especially the acting of the two principals. Yet driving home in the dark, as I began to contemplate what I might write about it, I could hardly muster any intelligent thoughts beyond saying that it was a good movie. I suppose it may have been fatigue, being in the middle of my late season run of the Oscar contenders. David Carr of The New York Times recently noticed that the glut was even 'gluttier' this year. I wasn't the only one suffering from this abundance of cinematic riches.
But what to say about the movie I had just seen? When in doubt, simply ask the right questions. What do the characters want? We are complex human beings, each and every one of us, and the great actors of history can have particularly complex souls, but in the context of a motion picture, the narrative must address a specific subset of motivations in order to create a story.
The metaphor of the confrontation between the two principals---the t.v. journalist and the ex-president---was that of a boxing match, invoked by several of the characters at various times. Boxing is perhaps the oldest and most repeated metaphor of confrontation in cinema. The filming of it goes back to some of Edison's earliest test films in the mid 1890s. It is the sport best suited to the movie camera, both for its visual presentation and its metaphorical implications.
Both characters want to win this boxing match, of course, but what do they really want? Why is winning so important? For Frost, the motivation is transparent and revealed from the earliest moments of the movie. His career has been on the skids. After reaching the pinnacle of fame in New York with his own talk show, he washed out of American t.v. and was exiled to Australia. He wants back in the limelight. He is terrified that his moment has passed, and he will never reach the top again.
Nixon knows this about Frost, which is one of his great advantages. But what does Nixon want? It is tempting to say he wants the same kind of redemption as Frost---a return to the prominence he once held---but this a misdirection, a feint. Nixon knows that his time in politics has passed. There is no redemption in that particular sense.
His motivations are thus more cloudy and less obvious than those of Frost. They are not worn on the surface of his soul, but revealed slowly over the course of the movie, selectively and intimately.
Yet what should be an advantage for Nixon turns out to be his weakness. The reason is that this is television, and on television, the straightforward obviousness of Frost will triumph over the inscrutable byzantine complexities of Nixon. Nixon can win all of the initial "rounds" of the boxing match---which he does---yet it is not enough. All it takes is a single question, and a single camera angle, to knock out the champ.
The power of Frost/Nixon as a movie is arguably limited by the fact that it is such a close adaption of the stage play, and feels that way so much of the time. This doesn't make it an inferior movie, of course, just one that feels constrained slightly by the genre.
Yet the movie excels---a movie based on a stage play about television, directed by a childhood t.v. star. That it does so is mainly due to the principal actors who are impeccable in every scene (this is the corresponding advantage of being stage play adaptation). This sets up the actual knockout punch of the metaphorical boxing match---a specific lingering close-up of Nixon's face, silent as he contemplates the words he has just spoken. The facial close-up, a shot that is made for boxing matches---is what television is all about, and why Frost triumphs.
Yet driving home I still found myself contemplating what did Nixon want? Part of his redemption was his public confession, which both he and Frost knew he needed to make, in order to live out the rest of his exile in peace. But that was only the public part of his motivation. A man like Nixon still has deeper motives, ones that never surfaced in the interview.
The key scene of the movie, upon which the entire narrative hangs, turns out to be a late night phone conversation in which the drunken emotional ex-president makes his real confession to a bewildered Frost.
As I contemplated this scene in my car, I couldn't help think of how much more sympathy I had for Richard Nixon than I once did. He was the westerner, from a small college. He went East, to try to be among the elite and the powerful. He thought they had let him inside, but they never really did.
I now know how much we were all misled about him, and what the source of the lies were. Even Nixon was not completely aware of what was happening to him, and who his real enemies were.
Later that evening I pulled out the book I had recently bought in Brookline and read from some of the middle chapters:
But beyond political expediency, Prescott may have had good reason to expect Nixon to follow "suggestions" from the GOP establishment---a reason rooted in the earliest days of Nixon's political career.
The pieces were falling into place at last.
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