The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Dead president: Sean Penn saves The Assassination of Richard Nixon from flawed direction

By Anthony Del Valle

Sean Penn is one of those stars whose purported temper tantrums upstage his capabilities for connecting, through acting, to what might be called the common man. In The Assassination of Richard Nixon he gets under the skin of a loser who is aware every step of the way that the American dream is slipping through his fingers. When Penn's character weeps with self-pity, when he turns violent because he feels there's no other way to be heard, you want to turn from the screen in embarrassment. Penn makes his character's self-doubt so personal, so universal, that we reluctantly identify with it. This great performance is not a typically flamboyant star-turn designed to be conspicuous and win awards. It's an amazing fleshing-out of a complicated character that Penn's soul seems to understand.

It's unfortunate that first-time director Niels Mueller can't match the thoroughness of Penn's talents. But he at least gives the actor the foundation to do perhaps his best work.

Mueller and Kevin Kennedy's script is inspired by the true story of blue-collar worker Samuel Byck (called Bicke in the film), who, on Feb. 22, 1974, while the Nixon administration was awash in Watergate, tried to hijack a 747 and kill the president by crashing it into the White House. What led the inept Byck to attempt such a desperate act (he was easily shot down almost immediately) is the basis of the film. And the sad truth is Mueller and Kennedy don't have a clue.

Their Bicke is a tragic, dim-witted Everyman who goes through all kinds of situations of generic despair. His estranged wife (Naomi Watts) is tired of his inability to keep a job and be reliable. When he finally gets a decent steady gig as a furniture salesman, his boss (Jack Thompson) is so stereotypically ruthless and uncaring that Bicke is horrified. The poor guy tries to hook up with the Black Panthers, but even they condescend to him. All through these episodes, he's watching Nixon on TV "selling" his promises to America, promises that in Bicke's view, all ring false. He chronicles his rage in a series of letters to his idol, composer Leonard Bernstein. When he finally loses his wife, his job and the loyalty of his brother (the excellent Michael Wincott) when he tries to swindle him, he snaps.

The relentlessly hard-nosed, despairing tone brings to mind a rash of Vietnam-era angst films, most notably Martin Scorsese's 1976 ode to urban alienation, Taxi Driver. But Bicke's situation, his state of mind, isn't made specific enough to earn this movie a place alongside its predecessors. He's a type, not a human being. His boss is such a one-note bad guy--a capitalistic pig--that the film turns inappropriately comic whenever Thompson turns up on screen to bully our hero. Even the relationship to Nixon's behavior and Bicke's mental state--the heart of the film--is vague. The implication is that Nixon's dishonesty bears some metaphorical responsibility for Bicke's actions. But there's no indication that Bicke's mental state would be any different under, for example, Reagan or Clinton's influences. You get the impression that the events in the film are less the result of logic and more the writers' determination to force Bicke into the mode of tragic figure.

But Penn supplies his own logic. When Bicke begs his brother, unsuccessfully, to understand how tough he's had it, to not desert him, you feel there's a part of big, arrogant Hollywood star Penn that connects to and respects this simple man's agony. Penn's talent is that he makes the most ordinary among us look at him on the screen and think, "He is me."