“The American people need a conviction,” says James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell) early in Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s distinguished adaptation of the stage production by the same name. He’s referring, of course, to former President Richard Nixon, pardoned for whatever crimes he may have committed during Watergate and its related scandals. Nixon, out of office three years when the film gets going, had always maintained his innocence in the matter, which begs the question: If he was innocent, why was he pardoned? It can be said that Nixon never fully owned up to his culpability, and the American people, forgiving as they are, never completely let him off the hook. His 1977 interviews with David Frost, on which the movie is centered, were the closest either side ever came to any kind of closure. Gerald Ford’s pardon made a conviction in the U.S. Senate impossible, but a conviction on television – a medium that more than once helped build Nixon up and tear him down – might, in the end, carry just as much weight. Television, the modern centerpiece of the American household, had in all its eminence changed the tide of opinion on Vietnam, aborting two presidencies in the process. Sure, its methods were unenlightened, but as an arena it was free of the bondages that have tied down the legal system. Anyway, it would have to do.

We’ve seen Nixon played by many actors and in many settings, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen him played with the understated power of Frank Langella. Most Nixon-based films revolve around either his ascension or his final days in office. Here Langella delivers a different Nixon, a still-confident but humiliated man living in a California exile with his tail between his legs. About the 37th president, as much can be gleaned from an early shot of Langella, peering sheepishly out his window as David Frost (Michael Sheen) arrives with his producer and a young lady friend, as in all of Nixon’s dialogue in the movie. And yet despite his slouch and puppy dog eyes, Langella cuts an imposing figure, reminding us that the man we elected was not the cartoon character we’d prefer him to be. In subsequent scenes, Langella slowly releases the inner, dark Nixon, the one we remember cursing on White House tapes, drinking highballs, hairy and sweaty. In his performance, Langella walks a fine line, but not once does he stumble into caricature. Like the real Tricky Dick, he is capable of eliciting both disgust and empathy, sometimes simultaneously.