Words are their swords and TV their arena

Movie producers are gambling heavily, both at the box office and for the upcoming Academy Awards, that old news can be dramatic news.

Opening in theaters this holiday season are, among others, recreations of the assassination of a gay political activist ("Milk"), an attempted assassination of Hitler ("Valkyrie") and, most intriguing of all, a debate involving former President Richard Nixon.

It seems that Hollywood is asking if we really want serious films, or do we just say that while buying tickets for mindless comic book computer shows.

"Frost/Nixon" - an adaptation of a London and Broadway play - is mostly talk and hinges perilously on the precept that seeing Nixon apologize will be enough of a payoff to fill movie theaters.

Director Ron Howard saw the play at London's Donmar Warehouse two years ago and immediately decided that it should be a movie. He used the play's leading man, Frank Langella, as Nixon rather than going for a big movie name.

Langella, who won the Tony Award for this performance, will have Nixon to kick around all the way to the Oscars, where he will most assuredly be a contender.

"Only one of us can win," David Frost, the showy British TV interviewer, declares in a manner that is obviously meant to get us in a "High Noon" frame of mind.

Peter Morgan, adapting his own stage play, has the crafty one reply: "And I shall be your fiercest adversary. I shall come at you with everything I've got because the limelight can only shine on one of us. And for the other, it'll be the wilderness, with nothing and no one for company but those voices ringing in our head."

It is the voices ringing in Nixon's head that keep us interested in what, in spite of Howard's efforts, remains a filmed stage play. There are a few scenes of open air but for the most part the play has been preserved, just as it has in another of the season's motherload of Oscar contenders, "Doubt."

David Frost, against the odds and with a hefty checkbook, persuaded the resigned president to go on American television for a series of four interviews in the summer of 1977. Many millions tuned in to see if he would finally tell something or other about the office break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that did him in.

Langella looks nothing like Nixon, but he has the jowls and, most of all, conveys the paranoia and ego that help us to understand what brought Nixon down.

We were more intrigued by Anthony Hopkins' more all-encompassing performance in Oliver Stone's "Nixon," but this film does better at getting into his mind and revealing his brilliance as well as his questionable morality. He was the guy from modest beginnings who worked his own way up through Duke University and had no family fortune or aristocratic pedigree to help him. Here, for all to see, is the arrogance of a man who never quite convinced himself that he was as great as he wanted to be.

An adversary is needed, and Morgan's script succeeds in proving that David Frost was up to the occasion. Frost was not an entertainer like Johnny Carson, but he was certainly not a political journalist either. The film devotes a good deal of time to setting up the interview - the dealings, the checkbooks, the unlikelihood that a series of four interviews with Nixon could be a commercial success. Back in 1977, there was a fear that the public had had enough. That fear probably still exists in 2008 for the movie's producers.

Frost is pictured as a superficial playboy, but one with ambitions to be more. Michael Sheen, who was so good as Tony Blair in "The Queen," scores again here by effectively suggesting the vulnerability of his subject. It is David vs. Goliath and, just as in all those prize-fight movies, the "good guy" loses the early rounds only to come in for a knockout in the finale.

The differences are clear. Frost is a jet-setting playboy. Nixon is a loner. Frost has the glamorous Caroline Cushing as his escort, played by the charismatic Rebecca Hall. Nixon married the first woman who was nice to him. Pat Nixon is played here by Patty McCormack. (She played the little child murderess in the classic "The Bad Seed." It's a mischievous choice.)

This dramatization is a good deal more interesting than watching the originally four interviews, which are available on DVD.

Even on TV, after all, it was just a "show" based on the fact that Nixon had never granted an interview since his resignation, had never admitted any guilt and had never "apologized." There were commercials back then, just as there is popcorn today.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com.