Frost/Nixon is terrific

Ron Howard's new film adaptation of Peter Morgan's stage play Frost/Nixon is absolutely terrific. Frank Langella and Michael Sheen reprise their Broadway roles as Richard M. Nixon and David Frost. It's an amazing piece of filmmaking, and the performances by the two leads are Oscar calibre. The film is only in limited release right now (to establish its Academy Award eligibility for 2008); it opens wide soon.

I didn't see the Broadway production, but it's astonishing to think that Langella and Sheen manage to do such subtle performances on the big screen (the kind of subtlety you just can't do on stage when no one can see your face in close-up) after previously having played the parts more broadly. (Yes, it's ironic that the big screen requires smaller acting.) Brilliant, captivating performances -- and Ron Howard pulls off the same trick he managed with Apollo 13: taking a story that all of us who lived through know the outcome of and still make it edge-of-your-seat suspense.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site