The Special Relationship

Michael Sheen seems to have made a career out of playing Tony Blair, first in The Deal in 2003 about his relationship with Gordon Brown, then in The Queen with Helen Mirren and most recently in The Special Relationship, studying Blair and President Clinton’s relationship in the years of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the war in Kosovo.

The film shows how Blair and his team re-imagined the Labour party, seeking advice from Clinton’s advisors, to make it less dangerously liberal, but more a viable option for change-the building blocks for the idea of New Labour.

It moves on to see Blair meeting with Clinton (Dennis Quaid) a couple of years later, as the President and his team become certain that Blair will win the General Election. When he does, the two men seem united in both policy, as centre left politicians, and in friendship-especially in the eyes of Blair.

Yet the relationship becomes gradually more and more strained as the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks on the eve of Blair’s visit to Washington, where he swears allegiance to Clinton, only to have the man later admit to having had inappropriate relations with Miss Lewinsky. The outbreak of war in Kosovo, and Clinton’s reluctance to commit to ground troops until the very last minute, leads to Blair finally severing the ties they might have had, by using the right-wing American media to help put pressure on the president to place his troops into Kosovo.

Peter Morgan applies enough dramatic tension to make the story gripping, and, as with Frost/Nixon, I had little real awareness of the problems with NATO at the time of the Kosovo war, nor much knowledge of the relationship between Blair and Clinton-‘The Special Relationship’ is a term now almost indefinitely linked to Blair’s relationship with the man who followed Clinton-George W. Bush. Morgan also manages to keep the story intresting with a cast of few main characters; it is really just Blair, Clinton, Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory), Hillary Clinton (Hope Davis) and Blair’s advisors Alistair Campbell (Mark Bazeley) and Jonathan Powell (Adam Godley).

This is in part due to the great performances given by the cast. There is a reason that Sheen is cast again and again as Blair, and that is because he gets the mannerisms so very right, and he is supported well by Quaid as Clinton, who is brilliant as a man desperately trying to cling on to power and the respect of the American public. My favourite performance of the film however, was that of Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton, she stood out throughout as a woman who keeps her dignity, despite coming up against horrible circumstances. McCrory was also good as Cherie Blair, a woman who was constantly made fun of in the press during her husband’s time as leader of the country, even if she is the subject of one of the films funnier jibs from Clinton; ‘She’s from Liverpool, its like the Arkansas of England’.

The best aspects of the film also came in the foreshadowing of events to come. In Blair’s passionate speech to the House of Commons on how we can never deny war on humanitarian grounds-an argument that would resurface in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. There is the conversation between Blair and Clinton in the kitchen of Chequers on the day of George W Bush’s election, where Clinton accuses Blair of having never been a ‘centre left’ politician, again, another criticism that has been levied at Blair in the past few years as he moved the Labour party closer and closer to the more ‘centre right’ Conservative party-an action that the new leader of Labour, Ed Miliband, has said that he wants to reverse.

The Special Relationship was a fine television movie, it was perhaps too small for the big screen (a criticism also levied at Frost/Nixon and The Queen by some), but it was a perfect piece of docu-drama, about some of the most important moments in recent political history, about the failure of a dream of widespread centre left politics and about the importance of legacy. It is interesting to note that despite their respective good works, both Clinton and Blair are finally tied by their respective tainted legacies, one for sexual misconduct, the other for a hugely unpopular war.

Frost/Nixon

The David Frost and Richard Nixon interviews of the 1970s are famous today for being the time when it seemed that Nixon apologised for his behaviour during the Watergate Scandal. If I’m totally honest, I know very little about Watergate, my only knowledge of it being about the fact that Nixon resigned and that it features in the film Forrest Gump!

However, Frost/Nixon’s (written by Peter Morgan, adapted from his 2006 play of the same name) greatest success is that it doesn’t treat its audience like an idiot, but does provide background information on the Watergate Scandal and on David Frost, so that perhaps more modern audiences have a better idea of what is going on.

The people involved in the interviews had very different reasons to want to get involved. For David Frost (Michael Sheen), the chance to interview Richard Nixon would bring him all sorts of fame and fortune, and he drags along his producer friend John Birt (Matthew Macfayden). For James Roston Jr (Sam Rockwell) and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) the interviews are about giving Nixon ‘the trial he never had’, in order to stem the anger of the American public. And for Nixon himself (Frank Langella), the interview presents the chance for him to put the record straight on issues such as Vietnam and Watergate.

The film has the problem that many films about historical figures and events face, which is how to give the situation enough tension, to keep the audience interested when they already know the outcome. There are some issues with this within the film; you can only make the interviews so interesting; and so there are some cases of stretching the truth, for instance, Nixon calling Frost the night before the final interview and drew similarities between them both and this spurred Frost into becoming fiercer in the final interview.

However, the performances make the film interesting. Michael Sheen does good work as David Frost, as I’m not familiar with the man I cannot comment on how well he performs him, but he manages to make him annoying, and yet the audience wants him to succeed in his interviews, as we see him having funding rejected and paying for the interview out of his own pocket. There is also fine support from Macfayden (despite him being saddled with a blonde wig) as his long-suffering friend, Platt-who has a great scene impersonating Nixon and Rockwell, who makes Roston Jr an interesting character. Praise should also go to Kevin Bacon (from Footloose) playing Jack Brennan, Nixon’s right-hand-man, who is ready to defend his boss no matter what.

Yet the finest performance in Frank Langella’s as Nixon. Anyone able to make Nixon feel human and even evoke some feelings of sympathy, deserves plaudits. Langella’s Nixon is a man plagued with insecurities; he keeps a handkerchief hidden during the interview so he can wipe away sweat after his embarrassment against John F Kennedy, and one that seems to believe that his actions were always right. He declares that the behaviour of the present can never be illegal, and seems incredibly interested in money.

Frost/Nixon is generally an interesting film, with a documentary-like feel with people like John Birt, James Roston Jr and Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), giving extra information about the interviews to camera. It would have been a strange one to watch in the cinema, as it definitely still feels quite small, perhaps a product of it starting life as a play. It gave me an insight into this important media event, and for that I am grateful.