I just got finished reading an attempted hack job of Frost/Nixon by Elizabeth Drew of the Huffington Post. In her article, titled “A Dishonorable Distortion of History,” Drew doesn’t seem to understand that the movie is a dramatization, and she comes across as disturbingly naïve about dramatic writing — complaining that some scenes aren’t ordered according to the actual chronology.

But what struck me the most in her rant is that her anger towards Nixon himself feels as fresh as if Watergate was yesterday. For many, the wounds of his presidency, which ended thirty-five years ago, have still not healed.

Frost/Nixon is an extremely well-done dramatization of the backstory behind the televised interviews between Nixon and British TV personality David Frost in 1977. While it’s likely to bear some added weight for those who lived through Nixon’s presidency, for the rest of us, it might be surprising just how well the film works as entertainment.

The central character is Frost, played by The Queen‘s Michael Sheen as a lightweight who decides he wants to interview Nixon almost on a whim. He ends up paying over a half million dollars, mostly out of his own pocket, for the privilege, only to find that networks don’t want to cover the interview and advertisers don’t want to buy time. If he doesn’t get anything good out of the interview, he’ll be stuck with a lot of footage he can’t use, not to mention broke.

Nixon, played by Frank Langella, also has a personal stake in the interview: it’s his bid to exonerate himself, to return to the East Coast from his semi-exile in California and avoid becoming “the liberals’ boogeyman” (as his military aide Jack Brennan, played by Kevin Bacon, says) for the rest of his life.

Langella does a good job, although as with all actors who portray real-life figures, it takes a little while for you to get used to the performance. What we’re looking at isn’t Nixon, but a characterization of him created by Langella and screenwriter Peter Morgan (working from his own play). On that level, it’s a success.

Watching two people sit in chairs and talk to each other really does play out like the boxing match the title’s punctuation suggests. Ron Howard has often been criticized as a direct without a style, but he’s drastically underestimated as a director who can make any subject — without cheapening it — palatable to the masses.

There’s plenty of humor as well. Nixon is prone to making sly non-sequitur jokes to throw Frost off guard whenever they meet, while Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt, as Frost’s researchers, have a well-developed rapport with each other.

The film condenses the interviews down to four sessions (down from twelve in real life), with Watergate being the chosen topic of discussion