Odd evening, yesterday. I’d decided earlier in the week that I’d go see Frost/Nixon, which I’d been wanting to see since, oh pretty much since it first went on stage in London. It was my last chance to see it too, as it clearly wasn’t going to stay in the cinema here for another week. Then, about half an hour before I had to go out, I decided I was so annoyed with my stupid PC and it’s stupid wireless card refusing to get along with the new BT home hub and wireless that I would rearrange the living room to fix it.
Let me explain. The phone socket, into which teh internets must of course be plugged, is on one side of the living room. The alcove, which is the sensible place for the computer desk, is on the other side of the room. Getting wires from one side to the other involves stringing them around the kitchen doorway in a tricksy manner. So to be able to use a network cable to get the computer onto the internet, I had to move the computer. Incidentally, I knew it was the computer’s problem because my laptop is adoring of the new home hub and will do anything I ask it to do with it, short of actually getting snuggly with it.
In order to move the computer, I had to rearrange the living room. The sofa swapped places with the armchair. The computer desk went to live by the bookshelf on the other side of the room, next to the phone socket. And then I remembered that the nice PC box which I inherited from my father is so freaking huge that it won’t fit in the spot it’s supposed to in the desk. So I had to unscrew bits of the desk and remove a shelf. Then I had to take the handsaw and take off half of the plank along the back of the desk so that the box wouldn’t overbalance the desk. And then I had to plug everything back in again and make it work, and I swear there just aren’t enough USB sockets in the world to make this computer happy. Anyway. It works. And the thing’s online again.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this I did actually make it to Frost/Nixon, which, it turned out, was worth the wait. I wasn’t alive back then, and so I have no idea of what it was like, and I don’t remember seeing much actual footage of Nixon, ever. I do remember seeing bits of Breakfast with Frost, and finding Frost annoying, but that’s about it. So first off, it’s really weird hearing David Frost’s voice coming out of Michael Sheen’s mouth. Even odder than hearing Tony Blair’s voice come out of it. He really is astonishingly good as Frost. I had never realised how completely out of his depth Frost was, or how completely unlikely it was that he would get that confession out of Nixon. It just seemed to me like it was this inevitable thing. So what I really liked about the film was the way in which it made it clear that it never was this inevitable thing, and, frankly, just how close Frost came to completely failing to get it at all. I am aware that the phone call that is in the film is ahistorical, but at the same time, it works as an explanation for something changing in Frost’s approach that worked, madly, at just the right moment. It made, in a way, for the most un-movie-like movie, because although it did create a hinge moment that triggers the finale, there isn’t, really any of the usual build up to that moment. It just comes, out of the blue, so there isn’t any of the normal sense of inevitably – which is good, given that 99% of people who watch the film will know the ending, and it makes you realise that it really really wasn’t.
