Frankly My Dear: Molly Haskell's Exploration Of Nation And Of Self

Frost/Nixon
Ron Howard

This film has been talked about on channel 13 Charlie Rose and talked about in the press and talked about and talked about so why see it?

I saw the original TV Frost/Nixon interview. I remember ex-President Nixon and where I was when I saw him, live on TV, resigning the Presidency. Why go back there again?

Because this is the guts of history, the moment when we can see into the wheels that turn to create the quality of our lives. And here we have another expose on the President and on how television works or fails to work and a close-up focused on an intensely lonely man who we all hated because we hadn't met up with the likes of George W Bush.

At the hands of Ron Howard, Director and Peter Morgan writer Nixon appears as a tragic historical figure for whom one could almost feel sorry if he hadn't destroyed so much of what people were taught to believe or been responsible for so many deaths and so much physical destruction.

Maybe Nixon did us all a big favor. He appears to epitomize the home grown boy no one wants to claim as their own. Just by being Nixon: corrupt, monomaniacal, devious, liar, manipulator. He could be a big time drug dealer, a Blackwater guns for hire or Governor of Illinois.

The question remains; how can we raise our children to be nothing like Nixon or George W Bush or all the other corrupt politicians who people our World. Their lack of compromise, their failure to invoke the power of negotiation before the bullet or the bomb, their failure to work within the legal boundaries of the system is legendary.

See Nixon suffer. Watch him squirm, watch his face distort with emotion that no one ever thought he had.

Frank Langella's acting is superb and should earn him an Oscar.

Of course you will see this film. The only question is, at what age should children see it.

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective