Richard Nixon (Frank Langella, right) and Michael Sheen (David Frost) in Imagine Entertainment’s “Frost/Nixon.”

At first glance, a movie about an interview doesn’t seem like the type of cinematic fare that would keep you on the edge of your seat. In fact, going into “Frost/Nixon”, one isn’t quite sure whether to expect cinematic drama or documentary analysis.
But while the movie, at times, has a documentary feel — complete with old news footage, audio of Richard Nixon’s White House recordings and cut-scene interviews – it’s the drama that stands out most.
In 1977, British journalist David Frost, then primarily considered a talk show host, conducted a four-day, 28-hour interview with Nixon. The former president, three years removed from his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal, gave his only public apology in front of what was at the time the largest television audience in history.
The Watergate scandal may be ingrained in America’s collective consciousness, but even seasoned political junkies seem to know little about David Frost’s historic interview with Nixon. Knowing that any movie is “based on a true story” is likely to take some creative liberties, you walk out of the movie wondering if everything that occurred on screen between Frank Langella’s Nixon and Michael Sheen’s Frost is accurate. The fascinating way in which these events were depicted in the movie make you wonder even more.
Watching the interview process unfold throughout the movie, your sympathy goes out to Frost, a larger-than-life television personality of his day who was derided by the media establishment as a talk show dilettante practicing checkbook journalism. His charm and confidence erode, first as American networks declined to make deals to air the interviews, then as Nixon runs circles around him at the start of the interview process.
As Frost eventually gains the upper hand on his subject, turning the tide in what had seemed a David-versus-Goliath confrontation, you hang on every word of the interview, becoming less concerned about Nixon getting the trial he never had — as Frost colleague James Reston hoped the interview would be — as you are about Frost winning the battle in which he had been so outmatched.
But much of the movie inspires sympathy for Nixon as well. His rambling late-night phone call to Frost grants a front-row seat to the insecurities and indignation that are often said to have been the foundation of both Nixon’s rise and fall, and the resigned sadness he exhibits as he walks away from the momentous last day of interviewing provide a vivid portrait of a proud and emotionally exhausted man who knows the end has truly come for him.
Unlike in “All The President’s Men,” to which any movie about Watergate is bound to draw comparisons, Nixon is not the enemy, at least not in the end. Showing a human side of Nixon that most Americans have never seen leads him away from his cinematic role as the film’s bad guy. It may not make him the good guy — that role is reserved for Frost — but leaves him somewhere in between.
As you near the end of the movie, you almost empathize with Reston as he struggles with the question of whether to shake Nixon’s hand when they meet on the first day of the interviews. Like Reston, you invariably do.
In a way, knowing how Frost’s and Nixon’s lives turned out after they parted ways validates how you feel about the two men as the movie ends. Frost became a very successful television journalist for whom interviews with the most powerful people in the world became routine, while Nixon spent his post-Watergate years in relative silence and isolation from the public eye, forever haunted by the events the ended his presidency and attached the suffix -gate to every scandal.
It’s the magnitude of the film’s topic that draws you in at first, but it’s the relationship between Frost and Nixon that weigh most heavily on you at the end — a relationship seemingly marked by mutual respect and a bond they share from their confrontation. They seem to wish each other well, despite Frost’s poking of Nixon’s political and psychological bruise, and Nixon’s attempts to restore his reputation at Frost’s expense.
The Frost-Nixon interview may not be as compelling a story as Watergate and the movie probably won’t become the cultural icon that “All The President’s Men” is. But the story behind that story is worth seeing all the same.