Stars: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones, Matthew Macfadyen
Running time: 122 mins
Rating: ★★★★

AFTER The Queen and before the release of The Damned United (about Brian Clough’s time at Leeds), writer Peter Morgan treats us to a screen version of his awardwinning play. The original theatre leading actors reprise their roles.

Frank Langella is President Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen, now established as the king of the copycats, is interviewer David Frost following his eye-catching turns as Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams (no jokes about being unable to spot the difference).

The basis for the movie is unlikely – the televised Frost/Nixon interviews in the summer of 1977 that attracted the largest audience for a news programme in the history of American TV.

What viewers wanted to see was the disgraced president own up and apologise following the Watergate affair. Frost needed – at least for the purposes of dramatic impact in this film –a confession to bolster his reputation as an interviewer and to recoup his investment in the TV confrontation. What’s brilliantly conveyed in Morgan’s script is the two men’s teams determination to weigh the odds in their leader’s favour.

Frost is seen as the David against Goliath, a TV inteviewer who needed a “win” against a heavyweight like Nixon to cement his reputation after gaining fame as a satirist on shows like That Was The Week That Was.

Some liberties have been taken with the facts to give the story even more dramatic power, but make no mistake, a TV interview has rarely been so full of edge-ofseat suspense.

Just as you’re thinking Langella looks and sounds nothing like Nixon, he’ll do something or say something that rings uncannily true. Sheen does just enough not to make you worry that you’re watching an impostor.

Parkinson was never this exciting, apart from the time he was mauled by Emu.