Frost/Nixon

At the end of Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, currently running a limited engagement at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, a live televised image of Frank Langella, as Richard Nixon, is projected on a large multi-monitor mosaic backdrop. The image is frightening, the stuff of nightmares, not so much because it is the moment when Nixon finally admits wrong-doing, but because Frank Langella’s heavily made-up face looks like a large Mardi-Gras puppet head.

It is often said that the camera hides nothing, but here the camera reveals very little. With a great disservice done to Mr. Langella’s uncanny imitation of Richard Nixon, the large video image allows the audience to really look into his eyes, and the eyes will always call the actor’s bluff. And here the bluff was obvious: Langella’s performance is nothing more than a well-rehearsed caricature. There was no inner life in his eyes. Just Frank Langella.

When I saw Oliver Stone’s Nixon with Anthony Hopkins as the paranoid President. the characterization was so excessive in it’s sleaziness that I began it to feel sorry for ol’ Tricky Dick. But perhaps I have some perspective, as the Nixon era happened during my childhood and I never really comprehended the zeitgeist of Watergate. It is hard for me to hate Nixon precisely because I view him as an historical figure, who is intriguing in both his excesses and his genius. The Nixon administration is yet another historical case study of the corruption of power.

I remember watching the Nixon interviews on our console television. I was mostly bored by the proceedings, unsure why father was screaming obscenities at the television. Years later, upon seeing them again, I was struck by how disarmingly charming Nixon was in his self-effacement. Nixon, of course, was a Quaker, a sect known for it’s active pacifism, an intriguing contradiction for someone who ordered the carpet bombing of Cambodia.

But Frank Langella’s Nixon, with his exaggerated stooped walk and carefully studied gesticulations and vocal inflections, is a disarmingly charming caricature but bereft of the venality and menace that lurked underneath Nixon’s affability. I didn’t hate the Langella Nixon, I didn’t love the Langella Nixon. I simply didn’t care.

As David Frost, Michael Sheen is simply awful and representative of the most amateurish qualities of the British school. Aimlessly perambulating around the stage to depict Frost’s ambitious restlessness, I wanted to shout at him to stop. Motion does not equal turmoil. It just means the actor and director have no clue as to what they’re doing. Equally amateurish were the wistful glances outward intended to depict intense self-reflection, but just looked stupid. Sheen’s poor stage training was most evident in an early scene when David Frost is chatting with his producer. Never engaging his producer, Sheen’s Frost played the entire scene facing the audience. In actor terms, that is called “cheating out”. It’s cheating precisely because the audience is supposed to be unaware of it. But with Sheen, I was not only aware of it, but his self-conscious stage presence completely detached him from the through line of the scene.

Equally irritating was Stephen Kunkin as Jim Reston. As the narrator and moral conscience, he was often posed, leaning against the wall, watching the action with contempt and editorial comment.

As Jack Brennon, Nixon’s bellicose chief of staff, Corey Johnson embarrasses himself by standing and, for no apparent reason, barking his lines. It is yet another hackneyed characterization, the military man who’s single overriding characteristic is to bark like a drill sergeant. The rest of the cast were equally uninspired and two-dimensional.

Despite the acting, I did enjoy Peter Morgan's script. No new ground is broken, but it's swift and clever. Unfortunately, it is bogged down in the pedestrian direction of Michael Grandage. Grandage belongs to the "Pretty Picture" school of directing, where every moment is contrived to present a composed picture to the audience. Unfortunately, dramatic action is not static and not composed of pretty pictures and only emphasizes the two dimensionality of the acting. Theater is a temporal craft, like dance or music. If I wanted to look at pretty pictures, I would go to the museum.