Frost / Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008)
Ron Howard might well be the perfect studio director. There are lots of better filmmakers around, but Howard is a studio head’s dream: talented, reliable, professional. Even a supposedly quintessentially commercial filmmaker like Steven Spielberg will deliver films that are either much better (Jaws) or much worse (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) then they ought to be given the material; Howard, however, does exactly what he is asked just about every time. Give him a light and frothy Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel script and he’ll give you Splash or Parenthood; an undistinguished action script and he’ll give you Backdraft; a popular but stupid potboiler and he’ll make The Da Vinci Code; a too-tricky-for-its-own-good Akiva Goldsman prestige drama and he’ll win you Best Picture with A Beautiful Mind; a solid space based docu-drama and it’s Apollo 13; and so on, and on. The point is, with those and other films, Howard brought out what was there. He didn’t pull rabbits out of his hat when scripts were lacking, either, but that’s no insult, because he made every one of those films impeccably: some just had more going for them than others. And so it is with Frost / Nixon. Handed an adaptation of a stage play built around two extremely impressive performances, he has delivered an immaculately made film that preserves those performances for posterity.