To Close For Comfort
Penn too effective as psychotic loser in bleak "Assassination of Richard Nixon"

It sounds like a story ripped from recent headlines, involving a plot to hijack a commercial jet and crash it into the White House. The story is based on true events, but the details might surprise you. The perpetrator is not a foreign terrorist, and the intended target is not the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but another embattled Republican president. Astonishingly, the time is thirty years ago in events dramatized with bleak intensity in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

The directing debut of Niels Mueller (he wrote Tadpole), from a script Mueller wrote with Kevin Kennedy, The Assassination of Richard Nixon is a psychological profile of the mind of a would-be assassin. In 1974, one Sam Byck, a little guy desperately falling through the cracks in the system, was killed by police while attempting to hijack a plane on the ground at Baltimore Washington International Airport. In subsequently discovered tape recordings Byck had mailed to certain celebrities and reporters, it was learned that Byck intended to crash he plane into the White House in hopes of destroying the government and leader on whom Byck blamed all his personal woes.

Byck’s story presages the fictional Taxi Driver by a couple of years. (Is it coincidence Scorsese’s protagonist is named Travis Bickle?) Mueller sticks closer to the sketchy facts of Byck’s case, but essentially invents the inner story of one man’s private crack-up rippling out dangerously close to the public arena. To ratchet up the sense of impending frenzy, he casts Sean Penn in the pivotal role of Sam Bicke, and pretty much leaves the camera on Penn’s increasingly tormented expression for the film’s entire running length. True to form, Penn doesn’t miss a single tic or smirk, or pleading kicked puppy dog glance of the character’s gradual psychological meltdown; we read every frayed, shopworn dream and dashed hope, every drop of cornered desperation, in Penn’s face. It’s a tense, coiled performance, but the question for the viewer is how much time you really want to spend in close quarters with this guy.

Kicked out by the cocktail waitress wife he still loves (Naomi Watts) and increasingly shut out of the lives of their three kids, Bicke is desperately trying to get his life back on track with a new job selling office furniture. Nervous and utterly inept at chitchat and bonhomie, he’s not much of a salesman, which he chalks up to his inability to lie about the product to the customer. In fact, he’s never been able to hold onto any job, always trying to defend his "rights" within the petty tyranny of the workplace. Instead, he dreams of starting his own business, a mobile tire service, with his mechanic friend, Bonny (Don Cheadle).

Bicke is plied with Dale Carnegie motivational tapes by his crass and unctuous boss (an unrecognizably beefy Jack Thompson), who tells Bicke that Nixon is "the greatest salesman" of all time, having won two presidential terms on the lie that he’d end the war in Vietnam. "He made a promise, didn’t deliver, and then sold us on the exact same promise all over again," chortles the boss. As Bicke’s marginal life spirals out of control—his job grinds him down, his wife takes up with another man and serves him final divorce papers, the bank turns down his loan application—Nixon’s face appears on TV every night as the Watergate scandal heats up, and Bicke finds the perfect target for his rage against the machine.

Mueller doesn’t attempt to make Bicke sympathetic, or rationalize away his bloody crime. He does want to make a political point about a dangerously divided society in which have-nots might feel themselves driven to act out in extreme ways, and to that end he makes Bicke’s descent into violence comprehensible, if not excusable. (There are even moments of peculiar humor, as when Bicke, feeling an affinity for the revolutionary Black Panthers, drops in at the local Panther office to suggest they change their name to the more Caucasian-friendly Zebras.) Still, viewers may expect something a little more transcendent after being sucked into the whirlpool of Bicke’s psychosis at such close range.

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON With Sean Penn, Don Cheadle, and Naomi Watts. Written by Niels Mueller and Kevin Kennedy. Directed by Niels Mueller. A THINKFilm release. Rated R. (**1/2)
Review published in Good Times, January 6, 2005