Frost/Nixon/Milk: Get Real

THANK YOU.

Seriously, Jim. Thank you.

I couldn’t help but feel the same way about Frost/Nixon, which I liked okay. But the entire story felt all too simplified to fit into what was basically a sports movie arc. Our Hero loses constantly, and badly, until he wins at the end.

There’s nothing wrong with a movie bio. A lot of my favourite films are movie bios. But in order for it to be more worthwhile than a completely accurate, straightforward chronicle of the facts, it has to have a point of view, a bit of editorial panache, distilling a person’s essence (as the filmmaker sees it) without reducing it. That’s hard; it’s practically impossible. But I think some films do it. I like Lawrence of Arabia and Patton a lot, and more recently the I’d-argue-underrated The Aviator; I like the anachronistic approach of things like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. (Or, arguably, The Scarlet Empress.) I even like some biopics that completely throw out a person’s real life and substitute their own, like Yankee Doodle Dandy, although at that point one almost wishes they had just invented a fictional character. (Citizen Kane is in a way a great biopic of Hearst, but would certainly not have been a better film if it had made its subject completely explicit.) And things like The Queen, which are basically all conjecture, can work for me too—most biopics only have the creative guts to throw in one or two points of conjecture, where the formula is missing a turning point.
Every biopic (or picture about some real historical event) has to omit details, but I think it’s possible to discover new shadings and new emotional resonances in the subject. Frost/Nixon was very well acted, and had some good suspense, but like that other Oscar-bait Ron Howard biopic (A Beautiful Mind), everything is too homogeneous, too Hollywood to come close to the level of interest in the truth.

I’m still looking forward to seeing Milk though—although I will see the documentary as well.

Jim: what are you favourite movie versions of true stories, and how far did they stretch the truth?

Ordinarily describing Ron Howard's directorial style as "bland" or "blandly" should draw no ire or ruffle any feathers but Howard is clearly working against his dominant nature in Frost/Nixon. As he points out in his Charlie Rose interview, Howard moves away from the norm of his oeuvre -- proscenium, glossy -- toward a more intimate, less showy narrative style. Howard abandons the cliches and easy emotional pulls of some of his early films for a more streamlined product. The close quarters of the interview encompass almost the entirety of the frame and as the picture progresses he cuts less and less away from Frost and Nixon to where he finally uses longer takes and lets the actors tell the story that transpired in that single room.

Secondly, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was the parody not the inspriation; Walk the Line was the traditional, star-driven biopic.

You've probably had just about enough outta me but one more comment then I'll leave you be.

I agree with you on this much: James Franco does outdo himself in "Pineapple Express".

As for the pseudo-operatic melodrama... Like everything else we've been arguing about today, whose to say that final lovers reunion on the eve of martyrdom couldn't happen? And, if it didn't, what if it had? I think they would have said what they said... or something close to it... in the same spirit.

JE: It's not that it couldn't, or shouldn't or didn't. It's that, to me, it feels like an obligatory, story-meeting beat added to tie up a few loose ends (and bring Franco's character back into the story) than a genuine moment. But, as I said, that's a minor quibble and the kind of thing that we expect from Hollywood biopics. We feel exactly where these beats are supposed to be placed, we're so conditioned to them by now. I'm recommending the doc (which is also made in a very traditional, news-footage-and-talking-heads format) as an even more rewarding alternative or supplement.

You remind me of a question I have for opera lovers, though: Why does Milk say he went to the opera with somebody who was "his first Puccini"? Wouldn't he have named a character or an opera rather than a composer? Again, no biggie, it just struck me as slightly off -- as when the Advocate editor seems to go out of his way to mispronounce "VUR-dee." I know next to nothing about opera, but what's with that?

Jim, I am with you completely on this one.

Dan White comes of particularly badly in Milk. The impression one gets is that he is some repressed homosexual who can't deal with it because he was raised Catholic. Since this jives with the contemporary zeitgeist, one gets the sense that most people will get their history from the movie rather than other stories and swallow up the motivation of Dan White for the slaying of Milk, because again zeitgeist-wise it must be true. Whereas the real motivation is merely petty politics, that doesn't go over well though in a reading of the history of "progress".Haven't seen the documentaries though I look forward to eventually watching them. I used this source for the info on Dan White:

http://www.sfweekly.com/2008-01-30/news/white-in-milk/1

Most historical movies are going to lose when compared to a well-crafted documentary, or at least that's how I usually feel. Even when it's the same director. Rescue Dawn or Little Dieter Needs to Fly? I don't trust anyone who picks the first.

I mostly liked both of these movies but I would agree that both are more pleasant diversions than films that provide historical insight.

The problem any filmmaker or storyteller deals with is that history didn't unfold in a narrative line. It's chaos, a complete mess. It's a series of day-to-day or even hour-to-hour decisions that only in retrospect gets shaped into a narrative arc. The Civil War began with some guys putting on their clothes, strapping on guns, getting on their horses or onto a boat and so on and so on.

That's what I liked about Che so much. I can't claim the movie isn't shaped. Of course it is. But Soderbergh just sticks us right in the middle of daily events. The countdown of days (Day 340, etc.) plugs us into an overall plan to some degree, but for the most part we're simply watching people muddle through each day.

Of course these films are created to manipulate emotions and butter up the audience, but you don't think docs are as manipulated? They are as much, if not more. I expect a damatization of events to be manipulative, but docs pretend not to be, but always are. I haven't seen the Milk doc, but even Roger Ebert questions its construction in his original review.

btw, my favorite mislead in Milk is when Pill and Franco go to the sparsely attended memorial at City Hall and wonder why no one cares. THEN they find out about the multiple thousands of people participating in the candlelight vigil. These were two of Harvey's best friends, both living in the Castro district. No one ever told them? What jerks!

JE: I keep saying it over and over again: Docs are every bit as "constructed" as fictional films. And in the case of both these docs, I think they're more emotionally involving than the fictionalized versions now in theaters. Ebert questions some of the things Milk's friends say about the trial of Dan White -- and I agree with him about that. But I didn't take it at face value. (Milk's friends weren't the only ones who had problems accepting "The Twinkie Defense" and manslaughter charges for multiple-gunshot executions committed at close range.) I don't think there's any question that White got special treatment (he allegedly confessed that he'd wanted to kill two more that day), but the reasons are more complex than the homophobia directed at one of his victims.

In the movie, a woman talks about the battle over Prop 6, which would have allowed California teachers to be fired if they were gay. She says what she found most revealing about the experience was the amount of fear on both sides of the argument. I think we see that sense of paranoia that comes with being a persecuted minority -- a natural human reaction to the experiences we've just seen -- in Milk's friends' characterizations of the trial. Maybe it's easier to see that now, though I remember feeling it when I saw the movie in 1984. And now we know that Dan White got out of jail after serving only five years, and committed suicide less than two years later -- coincidentally or not, within a year of the release of "The Times of Harvey Milk."

If you watch the clips from the doc with this entry, you'll see the real story that the incident you mention was based on. It's strangely staged in the Van Sant film (who are those people at City Hall and what are they doing there with the folding chairs?), and it didn't happen to those characters. Another example of using composites for dramatic effect. Again, I'm not saying it shouldn't have been done; I'm saying I didn't think it worked the way it was done. You'll see why when you hear the guy tell the story...

This is why, in my very limited time I have to get out to movies, I almost universally skip biopics and stuff that's about historical events that are well known (to me). They tend to be episodic, and just less compelling than the actual documentaries I've watched before. I did go see Milk, however, just to revel in Sean Penn's performance.

But anyway, you've definitely hit on a long-held feeling of mine. Thanks.

Haven't seen "Frost/Nixon" yet. Even if it gets nominated for Best Picture, I doubt I'll care. I haven't cared about a Ron Howard film since "Apollo 13", and it's take some rays of heavenly sunshine to make me think otherwise.

I too found "Milk" to be good, a bit more so than it might have been as it seemed to embrace the biopic format in such a way as to negate said format's overreaching downfalls ("Ray", and, to a lesser extent, "Walk the Line"). It never felt so much like a story as a eulogy, and I almost laugh at the thought of how hard Van Sant must have tried in making the film as mainstream as it is.

"Paranoid Park" is the real Van Sant joint of the year, no doubt.

The biggest problem I have with Frost/Nixon, which I believe is a terrible film, is that of common sense. That is on the part of the filmmakers.
Now, why would anyone get down to ridiculously dramatizing an historical event that had already been devised thus? The real-life Frost/Nixon interviews relied heavily upon the dramatic personality of Mr. Richard Nixon, and the dramatic developments that unfolded during the course. I mean, forget Frost and Nixon. Let us take any interview. Hell let us take any television program, which ahs been devised thus only engage audiences. For one, an interview like this that had been designed to be dramatic (imagine the fiercest episodes of Hard Talk with Tim Sebastien, or remember Karan Thapar’s grueling session with Kapil Dev on the same programme), would naturally serve the said purpose in a film too. Why would there arise the need to dramatize it further, unless of course the filmmaker and the screenwriter think that we’re not intelligent enough to get it. And if that wasn’t terrible, they choose to include a thousand age-old movie clichés. You see, there’s no other way of saying it other than that Frost/Nixon is horrendously clichéd.
Frost/Nixon’s idea of a grueling interview is a boxing match. Not such a bad way of perceiving things, until the focus is lost from interview and is squarely shifted to the boxing match. That reduces it to one of those underdog stories you have seen a million times. Be it in sports movies, or in those melodramatic courtroom dramas, where the young brash hero is losing the plot. He isn’t given any chance against the schemes of the snickering villain, neither by his foes, nor by his peers. And then, just before the final round, or the final day, an unlikely source installs a sense of inspiration deep into the soul of the crusader. He turns an unstoppable force overnight, pouring over books and files and highlighting and underlining, or starts jogging and piling weight after weight upon himself all the time remembering the saddest emotional moment of his lives as if it were a leverage. And all that is underscored by some rousing music behind. The montage plays over and over. You might as well shoot one such set, and use it time and again, just replacing the faces using CGI.
The problem is that unlikely source is kinda like the worst scene of the year. Wait a minute. No, it isn’t it. The worst scene has got to be that jellyfish thing. DON’T TOUCH IT.

On the Oscarcast in 2006, I think, there was a montage celebrating portrayals of real people. Watching the real Lou Gehrig compared to his portrayal in Pride of the Yankees, and looking at the way he was depicted in Hollywood, I thought, "Is this in any way better than the real thing?" I don't think it is. Was there any reason to exchange something that worked so well and was so real for something more broad and stagey? You can come up with some reasons, but no good ones.

As a screenwriter, (and hopefully director), I have vowed NEVER to do the following: comic book movies, adaptations, remakes, and no, not even biopics. Not even for an obscene amount of money. There's nothing wrong with them, mind you -- some are good films with great performances, but to me a biopic being great is rare, because the real thing is always more interesting, no matter how much the writers try to punch it up. Sure, they rack up endless awards the year they come out, but very few are what I would consider "classics," or having any lasting impact. Look at "Chaplin" -- great performance by RBJ. Or "Walk the Line," which also features stellar performances, and certainly the better film of the two. Or any biopic about ANY film actor, (or singer). If any such actor is so great that a movie is made about their life, then chances are, their actual films are going to be better and more memorable than the one being made about their life.

Also, look at AFI's "100 Years...100 Movies" list. Or any great movie list. Not that I'm agreeing with any of them, but notice how there are very few on there, (though there are a few noteable exceptions like "Raging Bull," where the casual viewer isn't likely to know who the hell it's about). And how many biopics are being taught in universities? Not very many. Sure, they're heralded when they're released, but quickly fade into memory after that.

As for films based or INSPIRED, (usually being the case), on true stories, like Silkwood, (no, not a biopic), Changeling, or Zodiac, those have a much better chance of being "great," since the stories aren't always as well known as doing a movie about someone's life. But even then, I wish more writers would try to come up original stories. Say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan, but at least he TRIES to come up with original material, even when he's aping someone else's style.

Personally, I prefer to watch the "based on a true story" films rather than biopics, mostly the ones that are mysteries, such as those listed above, or even "The Night Listener," which is a film based on a novel inspired by a true story. Not a great movie by any means, but still more entertaining than something as predictable as "Coal Miner's Daughter," which is another example of an Oscar-winning biopic that was better in 1980 than it is now. I'm sure the same thing will be true of "Milk," no matter how good it is.

Would I ever do a script based on a true story? I don't know. If I thought it would turn out something like "Zodiac," then absolutely. Now there's a great film that made no money and won zero Oscars, but WILL be well remembered years down the line, unlike "Milk." Even when they try to be different and ignore large chunks of the subject's life, biopics still end up being predictable.

The talking heads in Frost/Nixon were incredibly distracting. Without them, the film would be a decent enough character-study-cum-thriller, but, as it is, it's unremarkable at best.

There were a few instances just short of greatness, mind. The unsubtle allusion to the war in Iraq, the unsubtle, yet funny, nod to The Queen, the final scene at the beach house...

Oh, and another thing: the presentation of Nixon as a repressed perv was a bit too much. I know the point they were trying to make - some sort of vicarious pleasure the movie Nixon took in movie Frost's popularity with the laydeez - but it could have been more subtle. Like pretty much everything else in the movie.

Oh, and by the way, I love Harvey Harvey Fierstein.

Pride of the Yankees is, I think, a pretty mediocre film, at best--two hours of incoherent storytelling, that brings up and drops threads apparently central to its lead character (especially his mommy issues) without actually resolving any. Gary Cooper is good, but when is he not? The only memorable scene is the scene of Cooper playing Gehrig giving the "luckiest man" speech--which is already on record from the actual source. And it was co-written by Herman Mankiewicz!

And yet people love it. (Maltin gives it 4 stars.)

This is a relief to read. I shared your reservations, Jim:

Frost/Nixon is a curious beast. It’s a movie based on a play based on an actual TV interview, and many of the real-life players in those events are still alive and working. Compounding this “truth via fiction” approach are the interview segments intercut with the more traditional story, where the characters reflect on the story. So instead of the real Bob Zelnick talking about the interview process, you have Oliver Platt playing Zelnick talking about the interview process. Why, exactly?

[...]

Which simply points to the larger problem. Frost/Nixon really is all about the interviews, but if those interviews exist, there’s precious little reason to see a dramatization of them; Langella, as good as he can be, is simply no replacement for the real deal. The movie’s audience, after all, wants to see the real man apologize just as much as 1977 American did.

I then went on to say Howard might have been better served following a more blended style a la American Splendor or this past year's Man on Wire, but then I think that about most docs.

Jim,

I've just watched the Tosca scene in Milk again. Harvey first mentions a person, with whom he went to the opera. And then he says "She was my first Puccini." He is referring to Tosca, the character. Two separate statements, awkwardly put together.

Hope this helps.

"Think "Milk" was a moving look at a charismatic public figure and a key period in American civil rights?"

Yes.

I find it arbitrary and annoying that you pair these two movies. Frost/Nixon was mediocre at best, watchable thanks to the performances. I'm not bothered by dramatizing the interviews, I'm irked that the movie showed so little of the interviews. They continually cut away from Langella to show Platt & Rockwell moaning or rolling their eyes at Nixon's (apparently) self-serving answers. I wanted to grab Ron Howard and say, "Hey, I'd actually like to hear those self-serving answers. Let me judge for myself." Like you say, Nixon was no dummy. I wanted to hear what he had to say. The entire movie was structurally rather bizarre.

Milk is another thing entirely. First point, it isn't a documentary. It doesn't pretend to be. So your comparisons to The Times of Harvey Milk seem irrelevant. The performances are wonderful, the period detail is spot-on (I live in the Bay Area and was 15 in 1978). The details of SF politics of the time are alot more accurate than they could have been. The Tosca bit is silly, granted, and your point about the vigil is a fair one but fairly minor I would argue. Also, did Sean Penn run over your puppy when you were a child? I can practically see you gritting your teeth thru your backhanded "praise" of his lead performance. Why? I thought it was remarkable that he pulled off Harvey Milk. So many Penn performances are intense, brooding, very internal characters that I half expected playing Milk would be a trainwreck. But Penn completely reinvented himself here, and was utterly believable playing an extrovert, an optimist, an eternally sunny personality. "Oscar-bait"? How about credit where it's due? But then, I've always believed the difference between a great performance and "Oscar-bait" is that one calls it the latter when one hopes it won't win.

I might actually agree with you that the real interviews are more interesting than the interviews in the film (although, one thing I like about the film is that the interviews have been polished so that we get more to the point... not saying that's better, just different, has its benefits) but what do you think about the movie going behind the scenes of the interviews?

To me that was really what the movie was all about and what makes it interesting. So, in some ways, you're comparing apples to oranges. Though, I agree, overall, nothing beats the real interviews.

What about the rest of the film?

Jim,

In general I agree with this, and I've been recommending people who enjoyed Milk to check out the superior documentary.

However, it's at least worth mentioning some of the things that Van Sant does that don't fulfill the more traditional clichés of the biopic: the movie obsesses over the details of San Francisco politics often at the expense of exploring its titular character, the first third is especially fragmented and borderline impressionistic, and more importantly, he leaves Dan White without a clear motive for the murders (that is, Van Sant stacks a series of possible motives ranging from what someone above called "petty politics" to unhinged insecurity to latent homosexuality to substance abuse, but refuses to weight any of them or draw any clear lines from possible motive to actual crime). I know the bar is set low here, but consider how rarely we've seen based-on-a-true-story movies that don't make these kinds of facile claims. This is where his experience directing Elephant must have come in, with something of a parallel established by the long shot following White as he stalks the corridors of City Hall.

That being said, the strained Tosca moments were unfortunate, as was the completely unnecessary and distracting framing device.

You've hit on an odd sort of double standard here, in which you hold fiction films strictly accountable for what happens onscreen, yet grant considerable leeway to nonfiction films. I wonder if that would explain the greater critical regard granted to documentaries, even though from a stylistic point of view most of them are paragons of dullness.

JE: Can you cite examples from these films to illustrate your premises -- and your conclusion about dullness?

The biggest problem I have with Frost/Nixon, which I believe is a terrible film, is that of common sense. That is on the part of the filmmakers.
Now, why would anyone get down to ridiculously dramatizing an historical event that had already been devised thus? The real-life Frost/Nixon interviews relied heavily upon the dramatic personality of Mr. Richard Nixon, and the dramatic developments that unfolded during the course. I mean, forget Frost and Nixon. Let us take any interview. Hell let us take any television program, which ahs been devised thus only engage audiences. For one, an interview like this that had been designed to be dramatic (imagine the fiercest episodes of Hard Talk with Tim Sebastien, or remember Karan Thapar’s grueling session with Kapil Dev on the same programme), would naturally serve the said purpose in a film too. Why would there arise the need to dramatize it further, unless of course the filmmaker and the screenwriter think that we’re not intelligent enough to get it. And if that wasn’t terrible, they choose to include a thousand age-old movie clichés. You see, there’s no other way of saying it other than that Frost/Nixon is horrendously clichéd.
Frost/Nixon’s idea of a grueling interview is a boxing match. Not such a bad way of perceiving things, until the focus is lost from interview and is squarely shifted to the boxing match. That reduces it to one of those underdog stories you have seen a million times. Be it in sports movies, or in those melodramatic courtroom dramas, where the young brash hero is losing the plot. He isn’t given any chance against the schemes of the snickering villain, neither by his foes, nor by his peers. And then, just before the final round, or the final day, an unlikely source installs a sense of inspiration deep into the soul of the crusader. He turns an unstoppable force overnight, pouring over books and files and highlighting and underlining, or starts jogging and piling weight after weight upon himself all the time remembering the saddest emotional moment of his lives as if it were a leverage. And all that is underscored by some rousing music behind. The montage plays over and over. You might as well shoot one such set, and use it time and again, just replacing the faces using CGI.
The problem is that unlikely source is kinda like the worst scene of the year. Wait a minute. No, it isn’t it. The worst scene has got to be that jellyfish thing. DON’T TOUCH IT.

Jim -

I saw "Frost/Nixon" two nights ago, and completely agree that the real interviews are far more engaging and interesting than the film. But I didn't think it was a bad film. It was well made, and well acted, but there wasn't much beneath the surface to sink your teeth in to, I think.

JE: Yes, I felt the drama in the actual interviews came across more forcefully than the dramatic construction used in "Frost/Nixon." Not because they were "real" and the feature was a fictionalized re-creation, but because the material itself was stronger -- more compellingly written, performed and directed!

"The Times of Harvey Milk" is playing for free on Hulu right now...

http://www.hulu.com/watch/49577/the-times-of-harvey-milk