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While occasionally compelling, Frost/Nixon too often points to how much better a documentary covering the same material would be.

When President Richard Nixon resigned from office, he refused to give what many thought was their due: an admission of wrongdoing, and an apology for abusing his power. Nixon’s sins were numerous, and many news organizations were clamoring to get the first post-resignation Nixon interview.

The atmosphere director Ron Howard and writer Peter Morgan, who adapted Frost/Nixon from his play, create is one of national grievance. Nixon’s abuses of power, from bombing in Cambodia to the Watergate scandal, threatened to topple the very principles of American government. The American people—often mentioned by Nixon’s opponents in the movie, never by Nixon himself—demanded an accounting. Admission was more important than punishment.

The man who finally got that interview was unlikely, to say the least. British TV personality David Frost (here played by Michael Sheen, from The Queen), exiled from American television to more obscure work in Australia, was more likely seen interviewing pop musicians than heavyweight politicians. But Frost sees in Nixon (played by Frank Langella) a chance to re-ignite his own fading star. Nixon, for his part, sees a chance to absolve himself in the public’s eye by fielding softball questions. And get paid to do it.

Frost/Nixon spends much—perhaps too much—time with this build-up. We learn quite a bit about Frost and the never-say-die determination that lurks behind his easy smile and charming demeanor. He pays for the interview out of his own pocket. He’s shut out of network after network when they refuse to engage in “checkbook journalism”—the practice of paying the subject of a story for the rights to that story. His team of researchers questions Frost’s ability to put Nixon on his heels. His shows are cancelled. And yet none of that will stop him from getting this interview.

We’re shown some of Nixon, too—not nearly as much as Frost, but enough to paint a picture. Langella, no look-alike for Nixon, relies instead on finding the essence of the character, and fills the role well. His Nixon is a calculating man liable to drowning his verbal opponents in folksy, meandering anecdotes and penetrating questions. Langella’s work is not quite the revelation it’s billed to be, but there are moments when we glimpse Nixon the man, beneath the façade. These are Frost/Nixon’s best moments.

Frost/Nixon is a curious beast. It’s a movie based on a play based on an actual TV interview, and many of the real-life players in those events are still alive and working. Compounding this “truth via fiction” approach are the interview segments intercut with the more traditional story, where the characters reflect on the story. So instead of the real Bob Zelnick talking about the interview process, you have Oliver Platt playing Zelnick talking about the interview process. Why, exactly?

Which may be the movie’s major problem. The film runs more than an hour before the actual interview sessions between Frost and Nixon begin, though it’s hard to argue that the interviews themselves—the tense interplay between Frost and Nixon—are what’s drawing so much interest to the film. This sin would be more forgivable if all that lead-up was more interesting, but it’s simply not; we understand what we need to know about the characters within thirty minutes, and yet the points are hammered home repeatedly. The interviews themselves never gel; whenever we get somewhere interesting, some drama intercedes and takes us out of that crucial Frost/Nixon interaction.

Which simply points to the larger problem. Frost/Nixon really is all about the interviews, but if those interviews exist, there’s precious little reason to see a dramatization of them; Langella, as good as he can be, is simply no replacement for the real deal. The movie’s audience, after all, wants to see the real man apologize just as much as 1977 American did.

Frost/Nixon may have been better served as a documentary. Or, perhaps, Howard might have followed a more non-traditional route. Think of American Splendor, the quasi-documentary biopic about comic book writer Harvey Pekar. That movie seamlessly blended dramatized storytelling with interviews and voice-overs from the real-life people being portrayed; at some points, the actors and the people they were playing were on-screen at the same time.

Splendor was as much about storytelling as it was about Pekar, just as Frost/Nixon is as much about television journalism as it is about Frost and Nixon. If Howard had played with the form a little more—or simply given us access to the actual people and interviews—it may have been more powerful. But as it is, Frost/Nixon is a good movie overshadowed by the source material.

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