British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen, left) interviews disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) in Ron Howard's new film, Frost/Nixon. (Universal Studios)

Ron Howard may have thinning red hair and a gap-toothed grin, but I suspect that he peels off his latex casing at night to reveal his true identity: a huge, walking, talking, oozing heart, one that just happens to make movies.

Frost/Nixon is a good place for Ron Howard’s inherent empathy. He’s made a compassionate and fascinating film, a triumph that leaves the human spirit unbludgeoned.

The guy has never met an over-the-top emotional moment that he hasn’t greeted with a high five and a bear hug. In hits like Cocoon and A Beautiful Mind, Howard directs headless and heart first. The tsunami of big feeling is why audiences connect with Howard’s films, and why he’s often mentioned in the same breath as that other American optimist, Frank Capra. But sometimes, an ability to feel it all can crush a story’s subtler senses. Around the fifth climax in the Depression-era-boxer-turns-saint film Cinderella Man — a film I would submit as Howard at his most emotionally lunatic — a kind of numbness sets in. You’re asked to care so much that you stop caring at all. How much triumph can one human spirit take?

Which is why it’s a near-brilliant move on Howard’s part to contain himself by attaching his intuitive understanding of blockbuster pacing and solid acting to a more cerebral project, Peter Morgan’s acclaimed stage play Frost/Nixon. The play is an autopsy of the unlikely faceoff between playboy British journalist David Frost and fallen U.S. president Richard Nixon. Their landmark series of TV interviews ran in 1977 and is now remembered as the closest thing to a trial that the pardoned president ever faced. But the play suggests that Frost was also a willing player of softball journalism, and that for the vast majority of the interviews — with the monumental exception of the ones that mattered — Frost was tidily outpaced by his wily subject.

Frank Langella as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. (Universal Studios)

Morgan adapted his play for the screen, and he closely travels the parameters of the original work, a strategy that serves Howard well: the script’s strict emotional borders keep his mawkish instincts in check. Michael Sheen (The Queen) plays Frost, a dandy (lapels big as roadmaps) and journalist who briefly tasted American success, but wound up in Australia running a chat show featuring pet tricks and interviews with the Bee Gees. His interest in landing Nixon is a selfish bid for return from TV exile, and he’s as shocked as anyone when the former president (Frank Langella) consents to the interview. It probably helped that Frost scraped together $650,000 to pay him, thus launching the age of chequebook journalism.

Nixon has his own motivations. “This could be your way back to the sun,” says his closest advisor, Lt.-Col. Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), sniffing weakness in Frost and sensing an opportunity to rewrite history in front of millions of viewers. With the right manipulations, perhaps Nixon could even return to Washington.

Langella doesn’t do the Halloween-party Nixon, but he discovers the man in the vowel-stressing timbre of his voice and his shoulder-stooped gait. This Nixon may not have the nose, but he has the instantly recognizable short fuse and a fierce intelligence.

Nixon is living in his own Elba — a seaside villa in California — but it doesn’t suit him; he looks as comfortable as a Scandinavian exchange student in the hot climate, always sweating and blinking. Leisure and age are conspiring to bore him to death (he has been ill), and he’s looking for one last challenge. In this way, the film sets up the two men with their opposing agendas as boxers circling one another. In the very human manoeuvrings of the script, they are not enemies, but adversaries, waiting to see who lands the first punch. Shot in cartoon-bright colours against a set of gorgeous, poppy ’60s furniture and architecture, Howard keeps the film energized and alive. He makes a hugely watchable thriller out of history.

Frost enlists a trio of experts to soften the blows: a stalwart British producer named John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen); storied journalist Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt); and James Reston Jr., a Nixon-hating academic (Sam Rockwell). Reston wants Frost to go for the jugular; Frost wants to go for a second martini, or canoodle with his special lady (Rebecca Hall, underwritten and underused). Sheen gives Frost a respectful patina of self-awareness. He never plays him as a fool, but as something a little sadder: a performer. Frost is an archetype in the making, a party boy famous for being famous. Still, his face falls when he’s told that he “defines a generation — like Vidal Sassoon.”

Light-hearted television host David Frost (Michael Sheen) wonders whether he's up to the task of interviewing Nixon. (Universal Studios)

Nixon, who acts benign and a touch doddering, is the aggressor in the first confrontation between the two men, throwing Frost off balance by asking him, just as the film rolls: “Did you do any fornicating last night?” It’s tactical, yes, but Nixon is also genuinely curious about this lighthearted man in the Italian shoes who exists somewhere between the status quo and the hippie youths he despises. Sheen’s expressive, pixieish face wears Frost’s confusion well; he slowly deepens as he begins to understand the possible power he wields. Reston is right: it matters to America to hear Nixon admit his culpability in Watergate, to acknowledge the wound he inflicted on the country. The delicacy of Frost’s slow awakening is Sheen’s artistic victory.

Frost/Nixon will elicit pause in any journalist who has struggled with the strange, parasitic relationship of interviewer to subject. As Janet Malcolm wrote in her seminal book on this topic, The Journalist and the Murder: “[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Nixon, for a while, anyway, turns the tables, grinding a finger into Frost’s soft spots — “controlling the space,” as his advisors tell him.

But in the end, the journalist wins. Forty-five million people watched Nixon’s (sort of) confession. In the play, the final line is about the power of the close-up; the world was less riveted by what Nixon said than how he looked saying it. That line isn’t in the film, because it isn’t necessary; Howard knows precisely how to use the camera, and the impact of a face on a big screen, to go right to the emotional centre of his actors. Frost/Nixon is a good place for Howard’s inherent empathy. He’s made a compassionate and fascinating film, a triumph that leaves the human spirit unbludgeoned.

Frost/Nixon opens Dec. 5.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.