In 1977, Richard Nixon agreed to his first televised interview since his resignation. It was granted not to an American journalist, but to an English talk-show host, David Frost. The erudite ex-president, desperate to improve his tarnished record for posterity, perceived that the inexperienced Frost would be a pushover; he thought he could chew through Frost’s questions, and that the inquisitor wouldn’t fight back. But the proud, embittered old politician met his match. The well-researched Frost, after days of being stepped on, finally cornered Nixon about his lies during their last taping session, and the fallen man uttered the only public apology for the Watergate scandal that he ever would. Squeezing that confession out of Nixon—for our sake, as well as for his—is what gives Frost/Nixon, the new Ron Howard docudrama about the interview, its drama and tension. The intellectual brinkmanship between Frost (Michael Sheen) and Nixon (Frank Langella) gives verve and excitement to an otherwise peculiarly nonpolitical political thriller.

Screenwriter Peter Morgan adapted his own play, and though I haven’t seen it on stage, Frost/Nixon’s clash-of-titans form seems ideally suited for the theater. Richard Nixon is for modern drama what mythical figures were for Greek tragedy. His shortcomings and faults led to his downfall, and he fell hard and before the harsh eye of public scrutiny. When he crashed, what was lost was much more than his career or pride—only his starchiest opponents (such as the loyal attaché that Kevin Bacon plays in the picture) didn’t feel somehow wronged. It is easy to imagine (if not empathize with) the intense emotional burden that Nixon likely shouldered, but the Frost interview is perhaps the only artifact that might offer some showing of contrition on his part, and the closest either he (publicly) or the country ever got to catharsis in the mixed-up wake of Vietnam and Watergate. I think it’s safe to say that most of us share Langella, Morgan, Howard—and Oliver Stone’s—humanist urge to prove that Nixon wasn’t completely a monster, and that he suffered for what he did. (It’s a humanist stance that’s paradoxically laced with an unavoidable touch of malice; we still want to see him suffer, after all.) But, no matter what the moral imperative (and it sure gets rather iffy here), there’s a tendency for actors, dramatists and filmmakers to want to take a stab at the 37th president, and if it’s done with enough bravado, there’s a tendency for critics to laud that performance.

Well, fine, Langella does grace the movie with a fine performance. However, I think the part is still tuned better for the stage, where grandiose gestures are often required to provide shading. His best moment, I think, is when he explodes at Bacon’s character after a chit-chatty talk Nixon gives to a doctors’ convention; the dialogue doesn’t completely serve him, but Nixon’s pride shines through—justified pride for his legitimate achievements. Langella offers us this wounded pride more handily than he does Nixon’s guilt. Howard trains his camera on Langella for the big “it’s my fault” pay-off during the interview—a scene in which this Nixon is more effusive than the one in the actual footage (clips of which are available at the interview’s official Web site)—but, I think, moments like the one where Nixon briefly confides in his attaché following Frost’s “gotcha!” moment are much more telling. Conversely, Langella’s big scene is when he drunk-dials Frost and openly declares war—both of their reputations have a lot on the line because of the interview, and only one of them can “win” it. (Fortunately, with caller-ID these days, you can know in advance not to pick up if Richard Nixon calls you at 2 am.) Though great pains are taken here to make him seem like a fair old ox, this scene is like an encapsulation of Philip Baker Hall’s tipsy tirade in Robert Altman’s 1984 one-man-show about Nixon, Secret Honor—a Nixon corrupted by his own delusions.

Sheen (no relation to the Estevez family) gives a smooth, almost effeminate, performance; but between his goggle eyes and vulpine grin, it’s almost too easy to see Frost as the patsy playboy that everybody else sees him as. (The real Frost is long in the face, and got his start in the English political-satire boom of the ’60s.) Sheen’s good when Frost gets desperate, but he can be so damn mousy that you expect his preened British accent to come out in squeaks. Maybe this is indicative of the larger problem with Frost/Nixon: It almost reduces Nixon to that hunk of cheese on a mousetrap, and Frost to an uppity rodent. Morgan and Howard take pains to make Frost “nonpolitical” to the end; the requisite liberal angst is relegated to his researchers, played by Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell (who looks like he’s come down with a stronger case of the flu than usual). The tension is high, and the characters are given texture, but everything is simplified and pre-chewed for us for the sake of what seems, in retrospect, an artificial goal.

I’ve anticipated most of Howard’s recent pictures (Cinderella Man, The DaVinci Code, et al) with about as much fervor as I have my dentist appointments, but this project struck my fancy. His direction is tight and efficient, and he modulates performers who have already availed themselves of the material (Langella and Sheen are recreating their roles from Broadway), but Frost/Nixon is weirdly impersonal; Howard is objective in the same way that the TV cameras in the interview scenes are—noncommittally. His detachment isn’t offensive, but it is rather graceless. On the one hand, getting Nixon to say he’s sorry seems imperative to the health of America—if Frost & co. make him look like a good guy, Americans will forget that his political abuses ever happened! On the other hand, despite these stakes (and the fact that Nixon does seem to have a few redeeming qualities), the standoff between Frost and Nixon is depicted as a game, fought by both merely for the sakes of their own reputations. When the match is over, they meet amicably and Nixon pines that he can’t be a likable guy like Frost. Poor, poor Tricky Dick.

But it’s very easy to enjoy Frost/Nixon at face value; I certainly did. It’s taut, it certainly doesn’t make its dense historical background seem boring (it’s set only 31 years ago, but who in my generation really knows all the details of Watergate?), and it taps excitement out of resources usually left untapped. It gets at that urge audiences have to jump into interviews of high-profile personages and ask all those tough questions the interviewer seems to be eliding. The movie also shows us the rich background, strategy and intensive labor that goes into such interviews—who’da thunk? We feel our heroes’ burden, and it’s exciting. But Frost/Nixon seems to be a celebration of intellectual fireworks without having any of its own. There’s a reason it’s coming out now. George W. Bush’s abuses of power were, arguably, worse even than Nixon’s, and now a new administration is moving into the White House, and plenty Americans are calling for Bush’s blood. Well, that makes Frost/Nixon a little heavy, no? Rockwell’s character actually says that the Frost interview held Nixon accountable for his crimes, thus deterring future politicians from malfeasance. We all get the irony. But the movie says an apology is all-important, yet we (and the filmmakers) seem to know that that’s not true. We don’t want Bush to kiss our boo-boos; we don’t want him anywhere near them. (And we don’t think we’ll find resolution in a Seacrest/Bush, either.) What we need is a lot more complex than that.