The Assassination Of Richard Nixon

Calling a film The Assassination of Richard Nixon may contrive a dramatic and engaging response but it also makes clear that this is fiction. Paradoxically, the film is based on a real event but has been altered by director Niels Mueller for his own co-written screenplay. Note the tagline ‘The mad story of a true man’ and not ‘The true story of a mad man’.

Sean Penn plays Samuel Bicke (I presumed this was a nod to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver before discovering a certain Samuel Byck was the real would-be assassin), a naive everyday American who still believes in the philosophy of the American Dream. In fact, the film could easily use the Taxi Driver tagline, ‘On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody’. Bicke believes he will be a successful salesman, therefore happy in his life and reunited with his estranged wife and children for whom he has been unable to provide financial security.

We initially sympathise with Penn’s character as he is an honest and liberal guy who has moved from job to job because he hates the dishonesty in the workplace, particularly the bosses, something that made him quit the job at his brother’s business. In voice-over Penn speaks many times of how the bullies in the world will stop at nothing to get to the top, while we see a TV screen showing American planes dropping bombs on Vietnam. It is this and Richard Nixon’s lies about taking America out of Vietnam, especially when Samuel’s bosses refer to Nixon as the ultimate salesman (‘a liar’) that builds up the deep bitterness inside him.

Naomi Watts, as Penn’s unsympathetic wife, gets a fair amount of screen time but we are never sympathetic to her one-dimensional outlook of the security of having money. Don Cheadle, Penn’s car mechanic friend, is almost impassive to his situation as a black man in a still oppressive Seventies America. Indeed, the Black Panther movement that only Penn shows an interest in is also depicted in an unsympathetic light considering how it inspired his actions.

One of the only engaging supporting characters is the manager at the office furniture showroom where Penn works. Played by Jack Thompson, the character is a little clichéd but it is doubtful that he is really a bastard; the impression is more that he is a regular guy caught in the rat race and is lonely. In the scene when Penn confronts him in a suburban restaurant, he is dining alone, and we are somewhat relieved Penn decides at the last moment not to pull out his gun on him, even if this is more due to losing his nerve than wanting to spare his life.

The scene where Penn’s brother (an eerie cameo from Michael Wincott) visits the flat is extremely poignant and very captivating in a disturbing way. It also hints at the family background which is responsible for Penn’s intensely psychotic state. His brother is cold and uncaring, telling Penn that it’s worse to be a crook (ordering 500 tyres for his friend to start their business) than a racist, and draws us in to perceived American attitudes at this time so that we sympathise with Penn’s disgust and emotional trauma.

The Assassination Of Richard Nixon is constantly compelling and dramatic, due in a large part to Sean Penn himself. Where the film doesn’t work is that it’s formulaic in places, including parts of Penn’s gradual descent into violence: chucking drink over rude diners who flirt with his wife, pointing a gun at the hostile but unaware guy at the car garage, then finally shooting the family’s pet dog, a moment in which any allegiance towards his character is lost as he descends into cold-blooded psychopathy.

The scene on the plane and the moments leading up to it are extremely well done. Classical music and hazy camerawork seem to encapsulate the strain and suffocation of Penn on the trajectory to his chosen fate. Hand-held cameras, of course, add to the candid and disturbing effect as we feel the panic and hysteria of actually being there. Since Dogme, this effect has often been over-used in film as an alternative aesthetic, although in this film it is justifiably used to appropriate effect.

It’s also interesting that these films are set around the same period in American history, the mid-Seventies, and portray a psychotic loner attempting a history changing act to impress someone. De Niro’s Travis Bickle did it for the love of a woman he knew whereas Penn does it here to impress his hero Leonard Bernstein. Though Taxi Driver deals with the nocturnal, seedy mean streets of New York and feels almost like fly on the wall documentary, this film is often a lot darker, with Penn’s character falling to deeper depths of the mind than even Travis Bickle had done.

A film that deals with assassination/hi-jacking sits uncomfortably in the current climate of concern over terrorism and national security. While it may be considered as just another film about the downside of the American Dream, if films set in another era have something to say about the present then I think this encapsulates the current nervous paranoia in America very well.