Frost/Nixon

There's some anger in the lefty blogosphere at the new Ron Howard movie Frost/Nixon.

First the important part: Howard manages the impressive trick of drawing out the character drama of recent political events, without car chases or violence, just the battle of two men through a political interview. As a movie its a success, that will educate the vast majority of its audience about the crimes and stain of a man who's name is almost synonymous with evil, -though the current US president has done his (unintentional) best to recuperate his reputation-.

The great sin it seems to these bloggers (of whom Drum and Yglesias I read daily and respect highly) is that while Nixon was paid $600'000 for the interviews (then a LOT of money) the movie omits he also would take in 20% of the profits apparently meaning that instead of the movies pictures "They were business partners, not antagonists, and Nixon knew he had to “make news” with some kind of dramatic Watergate statement."

But this to me seems a ridiculous reduction of Nixon's character and concerns to one of simple greed. He had many sins, but wasn't a greedy man (no one who so entirely enters public service could be), and worth far far more to the man was his reputation in history and to his peers (the movie is set in 1977, 3 years after he had resigned). A rehabilitation of his reputation would have done far more to earn Nixon a good income in the future, than a small cut from a tell all confession, that would doom him forever.

Nixon was a proud man, indeed this was part of the reason for his fall, so I cant see how these attacks, which are clearly motived by still apparent malice for the man (of the three highlighting the flaw, the only one not to live during Nixon's era, Yglesias is the most forgiving) are at all significant. Movie goers know he is being paid, know he is being paid a very high price (indeed nixon's agent gloats early on at the price), but ultimately know that this man who is still the only US president to be forced to resign office, wanted to defend his reputation against the onslaughts of the purile journalistic core who never accepted him, against the wider public which had now turned on him, and perhaps even against his own darker demons that led him to the drink and bitterness during so much of his adult life.

Finally, I think the question about dramatic license is the wrong one. We engage with art over real world events not to learn the history, but to engage the questions which a straight narrative can not dig into. Knowing the date on which Charles I was executed tells us little about the emergence of british liberty and parliamentary democracy, knowing just how many soldiers and tanks the allies had does not give us much of a sense of how and why they overcame the totalitarian threat of Hitler, and seeing the true financial records of the USSR is only a tiny piece in understanding just why Communism could never sustain itself in Russia.

Art in a way that only the very very best history and biography can approach can engage these larger issues, the philosophical challenges that give a timelessness to some rare, few historical events. So long as the identities are clear (no go say pretending Hitler was the victim), we gain as much from a artistic engagement with history as we do with the best factual objective detailing of the same events. They are different ways to interpret an issue and we need both. Indeed in this world of information overflow, that ability to move beyond the events to the issues that matter will always be important so long as this species is still breathing.

If anything these bloggers should be celebrating a movie which brings the drama and bloodsport of politics to the wider audience, and which nails a conservative crook to the wall with only slight changes to the historical script. (Indeed if you even half enjoy the movie, go rent the actual Frost/Nixon interviews which have been re-released, the amount of lines taken word for word is impressive)

I began watching the film with a somewhat politically engaged friend, and by the end had a half dozen of us, some of whom never even think about politics -even when in the voting booth- all enjoying the cut and thrust of the finale of the movie.

Postscript: Drew wants to pretend Shakespeare didn't take historical license as a way to damn this film ? Please... You have to be pretty desperate to damn any current piece of art by comparing it negatively to Shakespeare, but if you are doing it at least make sure you know something of the man and his work, Caesar after all never said 'et tu brutus'.