The Best Film of 2008

Frost/Nixon and Milk are two of the best movies of 2008. Rarely do films live up to their hype or even your own hopes. That it happened for me twice on Christmas week indicates that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

I saw Frost/Nixon on Broadway in August 2007, and I've been awaiting its screen adaptation pretty much ever since. I saw Doubt a week beforehand, though, and given how shaky a move that made to celluloid, I began to worry.

Thank goodness I didn't have to worry here. My fellow Frost/Nixon fan Patricia accompanied me. We loved it. I can't wait to see this again.

Like the recent Doubt, Frost/Nixon transitions from stage to screen. Unlike Doubt's John Patrick Shanley, Frost/Nixon director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (who also wrote the play) allow their story - British talk-show host David Frost's somewhat fictionalized 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon - to breathe and even grow.

Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their Broadway work as Frost and Nixon. Joining them onscreen: Kevin Bacon as Nixon loyalist Col. Jack Brennan, Matthew Macfayden as Frost producer John Birt, Oliver Platt as ABC journalist Bob Zelnick (looking nothing like his real-life counterpart) and Sam Rockwell as Nixon-hating professor James Reston.

It's easy to hate Nixon, yet the filmmakers and performers don't opt for this simplicity. Howard shoots the drama's opening moments, Nixon's resignation, from behind, giving the man respect and privacy; he echoes this with the film's last frame. Langella had Morgan include dialogue to illuminate Nixon's loneliness in office, and Howard features a scene of the consummate politician petting a dog - but in that uncomfortable, forced-jovial Nixon way.

When Anthony Hopkins played Nixon in Oliver Stone's 1995 biopic, it felt like a hammy imitation. Langella doesn't look like the 37th president - for one thing, he's several inches taller - but he captures the man's awkward essence. He's that socially backward soul who never learned how to make a joke, that brooder with a permanent chip on his shoulder. Morgan imagines a phone call where a drunken Nixon exposes his insecurities. It's the type of scene where an actor could chew scenery, but Langella plays it perfectly, giving us a portrait of alienation.

As Frost, Sheen shows he can play more than Tony Blair (The Deal and The Queen, other Morgan scripts), and he play this role well, too. Frost starts off a starry-eyed, "Insider"-like journalist, nowhere near as serious as he believes himself to be. Only when he's met someone more manipulative and savvy than himself in Nixon, outwardly his opposite, does the charmer slump and slouch. Like Nixon, Frost is desperate; unlike his adversary, Frost doesn't let desperation overwhelm him.

The newcomers to Frost/Nixon work wonders, too, notably Kevin Bacon, who personifies "steely gaze" and "stiff upper lip." When is this man ever going to receive recognition from the Academy?

Howard, Morgan and their cast have presented us with an engrossing cat-and-mouse game. Frost/Nixon makes for history at its most riveting.