Last night I caught an advance screening of the film Frost/Nixon - a two hour dramatisation of the famous interviews between Sir David Frost and President Nixon, shortly after the latter left office. Rather than pretend at any length to be a film critic, I will say that Universal Pictures - and the author of the original play - have unambiguously succeeded in turning the build-up, duration and aftermath of what was ultimately just an interview with a politician into an intelligent and truly gripping couple of hours.
But what of the film's politics and message? The liberal and anti-Nixon slant is obvious. This expresses itself in everything from the overwhelming focus on the Watergate scandal to the clear preference for telling Frost's story. Sir David Frost - played by a Michael Sheen who looks so uncannily like Tony Blair it was strange to see him in another role - features in almost every scene, while Nixon gets almost no screen time except in scenes with Frost. In portraying Nixon as a right-wing President with much to apologise for, much of the man's complexity, both personal and political, is lost. No one watching Frost/Nixon would guess, for example, that the latter had many critics to his right both for his foreign and his domestic policies.
The final scenes of the film portray Nixon as a sympathetic human being, but the viewer is left to conclude with the film's Nixon that this incorrigibly unpopular American was unfit for electoral politics, and to agree with one of the other characters that his most lasting legacy has been the way journalists even today attach the suffix 'gate' to every possible scandal.
The trouble with this analysis is that the real Richard Nixon won two Presidential Elections, in the latter taking 49 of 50 states. The real Richard Nixon's chief domestic legacy lies in winning the American South for the Republican Party for the first time since America's Civil War. This geographic change transformed a situation where the Republican Party had won the Presidency twice in the nine elections since the Wall Street Crash (both with Nixon on the ticket, incidentally) into the electoral map we know better today, in which the Republicans have won seven of the eleven elections since 1968. Like this or loathe it, it's a legacy of far greater consequence than unimaginative journalistic puns or indeed the political dirty tricks that inspired them.
