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Tuesday January 6, 2009

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Hinch/Howard on Frost/Nixon

Posted by: By Derryn Hinch, 3AW Drive | 3 December, 2008 - 3:42 PM

There could hardly be a more subjective, judgmental critic than this one when it comes to a Ron Howard movie.

VIDEO: Watch Frost/Nixon trailer

Not that I don’t admire the Academy Award-winning director and have enjoyed such movies as A Beautiful Mind and Cocoon and Ransom.

I am even old enough to remember him as Ritchie Cunningham in Happy Days and as a five-year-old kid lisping his way through Gary, Indiana with Robert Preston in The Music Man.

But when I went to see Tom Hanks in his version of Apollo 13 I felt like another of Hans’s characters, Forrest Gump, who kept popping up at critical times in American history.

I was reporting from Mission Control in Houston when Apollo 13 blew up and had three astronauts stranded aboard their crippled spacecraft 250,000 miles from home. Knew every detail of their miraculous and safe return to earth.

If Howard played with history on that one I would be on to him like a seagull on a piece of hot fat. He didn’t. This director’s brilliant touch shone through.

Which leads me to Frost/Nixon – Ron Howard’s audacious attempt to turn a series of television interviews between David Frost and the disgraced Watergate President Richard Nixon into a movie. Or at least adapt a successful play into a movie. Who on earth would watch it?

It happened more than 30 years ago. A generation has never heard of Nixon or Watergate.

And, being Forrest Gump again, I was there and had covered the fall of Tricky Dick. Watched the presidential helicopter take off from the White House lawn minutes after he became the first president in history to resign.

Like many journalists I had seethed that the one person who would get to sit down face to face with Nixon was celebrity talk show host and gadfly David Frost who invented the words ‘effusive’ and ‘smarmy’.

By the time the Frost/Nixon interviews went to air I was back in Australia as Editor of the Sydney Sun newspaper and watched the first episodes with a combination of scorn and frustration. Tricky Dick was getting away with it again. Frost wasn’t laying a glove on him. But. Softy, softly, catchee monkee.

In the final installment David Frost nailed him. Or, more accurately, Nixon, with some clever coaxing, nailed himself. And director Ron Howard has nailed it too.

The big surprise to me is that Frost/Nixon is not (for most people) a movie  about Watergate or really about American politics. It is a fascinating slowly-building gladiatorial contest between two disparate and desperate men. It is a fantastic movie. And an amazingly accurate portrait of those times and those events.

As I mentioned in my interview with Ron Howard, my wife Chanel is not an avid moviegoer. She has none of my interest in politics in general or American politics in particular. She saw it as a battle of wits and egos of two men. She gave it nine out of ten. From her that’s Oscar-winning praise.

Frost/Nixon opens in Australia on Boxing Day. Appropriate really. It’s all about verbal boxing.

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