WhatzUp

The Assassination of Richard Nixon
by Derek Neff

Since, of course, Nixon was never murdered, we already know going into director Neils Mueller’s remarkable The Assassination of Richard Nixon that the movie’s title is a misnomer. What may not be immediately apparent is that the movie’s main character, Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn), is also a walking misnomer: he advertises himself as a married man, though his wife has recently separated from him; he calls himself a successful salesman, though he is the low man on the sales board at the office supply store where he works; he frequently characterizes himself as an honest man in a den of thieves, though at one point in the movie he essentially steals a truckload of new tires from his brother’s business. His hold on his own self-destructive temper is tenuous at best, but we think - at least at first- that he has just as good a chance of achieving personal redemption as anyone else. We are pulling for him, because we are introduced to him when he is at his best; he is a hopeful, decent striver, and who doesn’t respect that?

The movie opens early in Nixon’s second presidential

term and continues through to the Watergate hearings. Nixon’s fall from grace more or less parallels Sam’s own downward spiral into violent depression, as his wife (Naomi Watts) divorces him, his brother disowns him and the outcome of the small business loan he has applied for becomes less and less certain. Sam sees his life as one long struggle between the world’s haves and have-nots; the common man can’t catch a break. In one comical scene, he tries to commiserate with a local leader of the Black Panthers (Mykelti Williamson), but he has a hard time convincing the militant leader that they share similar predicaments.

With nowhere else to go, Sam hatches an ambitious scheme for killing President Nixon using a hijacked jet plane as his weapon.

Penn is brilliant as Sam. His portrayal of the fiercely moral but mentally unbalanced Sam rivals that of Robert DeNiro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. At no point did I catch Penn winking at us, the audience, from behind the facade of his character. One begins the movie admiring Penn’s formidable skills as an actor; one gradually forgets altogether, though, that Sam is being played by anyone other than Sam.

Director Muller’s intent seems less openly satirical than Scorcese’s in Taxi Driver: Bicke is either an Everyman, or a Nobody, and anything in between is apparently unacceptable to Sam. In the movie’s final tragic, chilling moments, we get to decide for ourselves just which one Sam turns out to be.