Weekend of Presidential impersonators

E and I saw "W." and "Frost/Nixon" this weekend. The later was by far the superior movie. My folks saw it a few days ago and said it was a surprising must see, and the trusty Turm Palast was showing it on the back screen, screen 6, where mice chew on red velvet seat cushions and two large columns obstruct the view of 60% of the audience members. But hey, it's in English.*

Frank Langella (Nixon) and Michael Sheen (Frost, and my new fav. actor, I think. He was a better Tony Blair than Tony Blair in "The Queen") were both so impressive, and the pace of the film clipped along. At under 2 hours, it was a rare feat for modern movie going.

2008 seemed to be the year of the political impersonation. We had the ubiquitous Fey/Palin gag, and now these two movies which, while both entertaining, could not be more different in the way they handle unpopular presidents.

In Oliver Stone's "W." Josh Brolin is all youtubey one-liners and drawled grimaces. He's a cartoon character. We hear the lines that have become so stale in the last 8 years "Fool me once... won't get fooled again," "I'm the Decider," etc. The movie intersperses Bush's biography with scenes of debate and power point maps in his cabinet room in the weeks leading up to the Iraq invasion. It ends right after the "Mission Accomplished" bit. Nothing is nuanced, everything is bold-colored and comic and centered around the simplistic Bush I- Bush II relationship. We're supposed to believe that the last 8 years happened because Bush I loved Jeb more and thought he would be president, and Bush II was merely trying to get his love and attention.

What's interesting is that most of "W."'s content is unseen and imagined by Stone. But it all feels like it has been done before, in fact, I couldn't help but think my students, or anyone who's picked up a newspaper recently, could have plotted this thing. It showed us nothing new.

So it's interesting, and a testament to Ron Howard, that "Frost/Nixon"'s subject matter is actually real and well-documented. You can youtube these interviews and very little of what's on the screen is a "big reveal." But the viewer gets so much more out of the story and sees Nixon not as a caricature but as a deeply flawed man who, fundamentally, believed that "it wasn't illegal if the president did it." Langella doesn't play him as crook or misunderstood victim or even delusional old guy. Instead he plays him as a person, and hearing him speak his words opens up history and allows the viewer to step in.

* In Germany they dub all movies into German. You have to go to an OV "original version" theater to see American films in their intended language.