I had the chance to catch Ron Howard's latest film, Frost/Nixon over the break. It's about as good of a movie about the Frost/Nixon interviews that there can possibly be, but I don't know that the movie really did it for me.

Just so I state the obvious right quick; the acting was incredibly good. Not only were Frank Langella and Michael Sheen great, but the supporting cast of Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, and Oliver Platt all put in outstanding performances.

The direction was pretty solid as well. Anyone who can make an interview interesting deserves praise and credit. And is that a hint of style I detect there, Mr. Howard?

But for me, the movie gets taken down a notch in the writing, not so much in the dialogue between the interviewers and the rest of the cast, but in the overall structure of the movie.

Peter Morgan wrote the script (and Ron Howard followed suit in his direction) to structure this interview to be the equivalent of a boxing match between two heavyweights. Nixon and Frost both had their "corner" rooms that they'd go to and receive instructions from their "corner men." Nixon entered the house in much the same way a heavyweight boxer would enter the arena before a fight. At one point, Kevin Bacon's character made the direct comparison of a contender getting into the ring with the champ and realizing after the first punch landed that he was out of his league.

So if a boxing match was what they were going for, then they made Frost look like someone who just got lucky in the end. All the great boxing match movies are about the underdogs who diligently train for months and months and, no matter if they win or lose, they give "the champ" the fight of their life.

But in this movie, it was basically a guy who came in grossly unprepared, got his head beat in for most of the fight, and then lucked into a few hard shots at the end. Maybe a tie is what they were going for, but it sure doesn't seem that way to me.

I also don't buy Sam Rockwell's assertion at the end that Frost's showmanship was the only way in which the true character of Nixon could ever come out. He said something to the effect of only David Frost could have worked the interview in such a way that it all lead to one specific point, a close up of the sweating and doubting Nixon. I think that's a false assertion. Anyone who's seen a great Mike Wallace or Ed Bradley interview knows that a news interviewer/journalist is capable of pulling off equal feats of both showmanship and "gotcha" moments.

But overall, I enjoyed the movie. Gripes and all, its a solid movie.

- Matt