The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Think Films
Starring: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle
The Verdict: This tale of a relatively unknown American raises questions while showcasing some powerhouse performances.
3 1/2 stars out of 5 stars
On Feb. 22, 1974, an angry nobody named Sam Bicke almost brought America to its knees.
A failure as a salesman and family man, Bicke directed his rage toward the system-the business world that kept him at arm’s length, the government that mandated the offending business world and the leader at the height of the offending government-and decided to make a real change. His plan: hijack a passenger plane from Baltimore/Washington International Airport and crash it into the White House. No more “seed of government,” no more inequality, no more lies, no more Richard Nixon.
That was the plan, at least. Bicke’s plan failed, as did so many things in his life, and his name went down in history as little more than a quirky footnote, an unnerving bit of trivia. He joined the ranks of John Hinckley and “Squeaky” Fromme, just another deranged would-be assassin who couldn’t get the job done. Another anonymous nut-job to be written off and easily forgotten.
Not if Neils Mueller and Sean Penn have a say. Mueller is the co-writer/director of and Penn is the star of “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” a chilling resurrection of Bicke, his shattered American dreams and his plans for bloody retaliation. In a perpetually tense and disorienting post-9/11 world, telling Bicke’s story may be more relevant and vital than ever.
After all, he was just an average Joe like so many of us. He’d had a bad run in his personal life, alienating his wife and kids and running afoul of his tire salesman brother. As “Assassination” begins, he wearily says to his best friend Bonny, “Nobody thinks Sam Bicke is gonna make it.” Bicke feels impotent, invisible in a world that he feels doesn’t recognize or value him.
“All I want is a little piece of the American dream,” he later confides.
Pigeonholed as a born loser, Sam fights uphill battles every day.
He’s a man so accustomed to disappointment, such a glutton for punishing reinforcement, that he frequently haunts the bar where his wife waits tables, begging her to reconsider their separation. He’s so lost, so over-eager to please (he even apologizes for over-salting his own mashed potatoes), that he’s incapable of pleasing anyone, least of all himself.
But Sam is trying very hard to get himself back on track. He’s trying to re-patch his marriage. He’s just landed a new job in an office furniture store. He’s even got dreams of starting his own tire business with Bonny (Don Cheadle, indispensable in a small role), a blue-collar African-American mechanic with a wife and son and a practical outlook on making money in an unjust economic system. When touchy Sam is the victim of a harmless in-office prank, he views it as violation of his basic human rights. “What about my rights?” he asks Bonny; his pragmatic friend responds evenly, “You got a right to pay your bills.”
Sam’s boss, a blowhard business guerilla (played memorably by Jack Thompson), tells Sam he need only believe in himself to be a success, raising a glass to their monetary futures as he slips Bicke a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Sam is meek, shy, awkward, but his passion to please may just make him a fine salesman.
Yet no optimism for success in the business world can eliminate Sam’s growing feelings of alienation and disenfranchisement in a political climate he sees dominated by profit- and power-driven duplicity. Politics bring out the roar inside mousy Sam. He can’t focus on breadwinning for his kids or winning back his wife if he feels he has to lie to his customers just to get through the work day. Always a man of extremes, Bicke sees fudging mark-up percentages as a criminal act akin to wholesale slaughter.
He feels kinship for counterculture groups like the Black Panthers. He visits a Panther den, explaining that he too knows what it’s like to be treated “like a great big nothing,” yet his discontentment is so great that he even has unsolicited, unappreciated pointers for strengthening the Black Power movement (“You’re not getting to your whole audience”).
Sam also fosters increasingly antagonistic feelings toward American bureaucracy, especially toward Nixon, the government’s most visible and recognizable face. To Sam, Nixon was himself just a master salesman, an evil huckster who sold himself to the American people through two terms in an office and countless casualties in Vietnam. When his life ultimately crumbles around him, Bicke sees Nixon as the cause, the villain in his own personal tragedy, and, from Sam’s growingly unhinged perspective, the only way to become a hero in this unjust world is to kill a villain.
First-time director Mueller has crafted a small, incendiary film that is understanding of Bicke’s motives without being overly sympathetic to them.
The film respects Bicke’s voice and doesn’t make a judgment call about its validity. This isn’t a full-on indictment of Bicke or of the system that produced him, nor is it simply a hammy cautionary tale pulled from the not-too-distant past. It is too focused, too smart a film to choose a side.
Mueller presents the material with as much honesty as is more or less possible given the amount of apocrypha inherent in any factually-based drama.
There’s immense gravity and emotional upheaval in Bicke’s story, but Mueller lets his film’s intensity grow slowly, sensibly, seemingly inevitably.
There’s no grandstanding on display here, no swelling music, no schmaltzy writing, no phony lip-quivering.
“Assassination” isn’t a joyride, nor is it an easy sentimental sucker punch for an already crowded awards season. It’s something more substantial-a dark, cold, lonely film that inspires audiences to think more than feel, laced with more lasting questions than easy answers.
It’s also a highly accomplished debut for Mueller, who’s assembled a dream team of on- and off-camera talent (producers include Alfonso Cuaron, Alexander Payne, and Leonardo DiCaprio) for a relatively small independent feature. It was a coup to land freshly-minted Oscar champ Penn in the lead role, and the supporting cast is equally fine, from Naomi Watts as the fed-up wife to Michael Wincott as the betrayed brother to Nick Searcy as a well-meaning loan officer who finally warns a snippy Sam that “impatience is not a virtue.”
It’s refreshing, too, to see a film with period detail that stresses authenticity over flash. Simple touches like Watts’s long black hair to Penn’s square business suit to the way “Angel of the Morning” pervades the airwaves on Sam’s car radio evoke the 1970s with lived-in reality instead of winking glibness.
For all its virtues, though, the film sinks or swims based on Penn’s central performance.
Luckily, Penn’s work here is nothing short of brilliant, perhaps the actor’s most finely honed, nuanced and masterfully controlled to date. Penn dives headfirst into Bicke’s insecurities and paranoia and comes out transformed, mumbling and broken with a pronounced paunch, creased brow, forced grin and imploring eyes. Sam is a man who is unaware when he is being inappropriate, which is quite often. Penn hammers home Bicke’s na‹vet without condescension, understands the man’s contradictions without overstating them.
This is extremely powerful film acting from a modern master of the medium.
The role is a demanding one, and Penn, an actor of honesty and invention, is up to every challenge. Late in the film, he has scene after scene of huge emotion-he breaks down in tears after a damaging phone call, he pathetically rehearses his planned hijacking, he shouts his head off at televised footage of Nixon-that he punches with abandon, yet none of the performance ever reeks of showboating or overemphasis. All of the broad strokes serve the character, and serve him well. Watch Penn’s eyes. Even as Bicke completely cracks up, Penn’s eyes don’t demand. They do something far more poignant; they implore.
The camera close on Penn’s face, “Assassination” doesn’t shy away from or sanitize Bicke’s final failed act of defiance, and Mueller ratchets the tension to a fever pitch. Sam puts his last hopes in the barrel of a pistol, and the results are bloody, shattering and terrifying. And dismayingly marginal within the realms of American historical record.
Everyone remembers Lee Harvey Oswald, but who remembers Sam Bicke? Mueller and company argue, very convincingly, that a failed assassin is not something to be ignored or willfully disavowed. Ultimately, Bicke was a sputtering madman, mailing tape recordings to Leonard Bernstein (whose music Sam thought was “pure and honest” in a vile, dishonest time and place) and sprinting down a jetway with a loaded pistol in his hand, whose failure in assassinating the president kept his name from achieving ubiquitous modern infamy a la Oswald or Booth or even Bin Laden.
That doesn’t make him irrelevant. As the film draws to a close, Bicke irately records his final words to Bernstein and the world-“I was here. I did this.” With the release of “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” those facts are now impossible to forget.