(May contain spoilers)
I just watched Frost/Nixon and was disappointed for a number of reasons.
1. All the other actors aside from Frank Langella are completely boring and have no depth at all. That Frost guy is moronic in that he's only in it for the money and furthering his career, nearly fucking it all up except at the very last moment.
2. The whole thing is too sympathetic towards Nixon. He's portrayed as this lonely old man shuffling around and following Kevin Bacon, telling pathetic jokes, laying in the hospital, etc. Even when he's apologizing on the brink of tears, realizing how many people he let down, it's sympathetic. It tries to make you want to feel like you should put your arm around him or something. As if he didn't know any better. I know they were trying to make Nixon multifaceted, a deeper character, etc, which is the only reason the movie got an Oscar nom, but again, Nixon is painted as an old retard who though he was doing the right things.
Towards the end of the movie, Frost goes back to visit Nixon before going back to Australia and Nixon laments about his life, how he should never have gone into politics since he doesn't like being around people. That he was a thinker and perhaps he should have been the journalist and Frost the president. Frost gives him a pair of shoes. It's very "happily ever after" and almost sickening.
The movie should have ended right here after Nixon says,
"I let them down. I let down my friends, I let down my country, and worst of all I let down our system of government, and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but now they think; 'Oh it's all too corrupt and the rest'. Yeah... I let the American people down. And I'm gonna have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life. My political life is over,"
as James Reston Jr., a guy who devoted his life to studying Nixon and corruption and obstruction of justice, etc, is explaining the power of the close-up as Nixon has his epiphany on his failure as president:
"You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get; Richard Nixon's face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist."
In this moment, despite the sympathetic angle towards Nixon, it's a single moment of regret that we see from him, which is something people had wanted but never gotten. Even as he was resigning, there was no aspect of anything apologetic. At the very least, it is a single moment of remarkable acting on Langella's part. He has no lines, but his face in those few seconds says volumes.
My favorite part in the whole movie, aside from what I just mentioned is when Reston Jr is deciding whether or not he wants to be a part of the interviews at all. He wants to "give Nixon the trial he never had" and when he's met with a certain amount of disagreement from Frost, who thinks being hard on Nixon would somehow bring about more sympathy for him, he responds:
"You know, right now I submit that it's impossible to feel anything close to sympathy for Richard Nixon. He devalued the presidency and he left the country that elected him in trauma. The American people need a conviction, pure and simple. The integrity of our political system of democracy, as an idea entirely, depends on it. And if in years to come, people look back and say it was in this interview that Richard Nixon exonerated himself, that would be the worst crime of all."
All you have to do is replace Nixon's name for Bush's (or Blagojevich's) and I think you have what a lot of people are still feeling towards the last few years.
