Another Sean Penn flick looms just around the bend — his adaptatin of
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's acclaimed bestseller, which I'll be seeing next week. To stuff the archives in anticipatory fashion, a re-posted review of the little seen but highly worthwhile
The Assassination of Richard Nixon, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2004. To wit:
There are character portraits writ large and then there are
those writ small. The execution of the filmmaking aside, it’s comparatively
easy to sell the drama inherent in the real-life stories of individuals like
Ray Charles, Howard Hughes or even J.M. Barrie — people who have each left in
their own way an indelible mark on the pop cultural landscape. On the other end
of the spectrum, directed by Niels Mueller from a script co-written with Kevin
Kennedy,
the rooted-in-truth The
Assassination of Richard Nixon tells the story of Sam Bicke, a
self-described grain of sand on the beach of America, and as such isn’t
destined to find the audiences of
Ray,
The Aviator or
Finding Neverland, bigger pictures with insurmountably larger
palettes. In fact, its rewards are so modest and reserved that it’s a small but
appreciated wonder that the film is seeing a theatrical release at all.
Nonetheless, anchored by an emotionally arresting lead performance by Sean
Penn, the movie stands as
a gripping portrait of run-into-the-ground, working
class decency teased up into a furious rancor.
Inspired by a true story, the film is set in the early
winter months of 1974, when a rising tide of social inequities and injustices —
the fallout of the CIA-sponsored killing of Chilean leader Salvador Allende,
the stand of Russell Means and others at Wounded Knee, campus violence, and the
slow, creeping sprawl of the Watergate scandal — have come to make the very air
aspirant small businessman Bicke breathes seem oppressively thick and full of
bleakness. Sam believes that a man doesn’t give up his rights at a job, nor
should he have to lie to make a decent living, but he finds his values and
mores being tested in his new post selling office furniture and equipment for a
pop-and-son outfit.
There — goaded, hectored, humiliated and hazed, his
marginalization increasing tenfold every day — the socially awkward Sam slowly
falls out of favor with the few people in his life keeping him at all grounded,
namely his estranged wife Marie (
Naomi Watts)
and would-be business partner, Bonny Simmons (Don Cheadle). President Nixon,
for him, embodies the sneering face of elitist and discriminatory contempt, and
so Sam eventually decides — in less a hatched plan than a followed flight of
fancy — to head to Washington D.C. and kill the commander in chief.
Mueller doesn’t fully connect the dots between Sam’s
desperate, choking personal uncertainty and anger and the full-blown mania of
his assassination plot (at just over 90 minutes this is a movie of
masterful mood more than psychological substance) and Cheadle and Watts aren’t
given enough to do. But
Penn, in his angsty, swallowed depression, totally
sells this soul-crushing portrait of besieged civility. He takes what could
easily be tongue-in-cheek scenes of high-camp disaffection — strolling into a
Black Panthers office with $107 and pitching them earnestly on a more inclusive
mascot to draw in untapped Caucasian donations; awkwardly re-enacting a
potential “honest sales pitch” to an indifferent loan officer during a meeting;
and suffering the indignity of having to shave his mustache in order to look
more like a family man — and makes them
heartrending mini-portraits of
uniquely American estrangement and alienation. Spare and unassuming, just like
its subject,
The Assassination of Richard
Nixon doesn’t have the flash and pop of many of this awards season’s bigger
biopics. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a solid film, one of the better
character studies of 2004.
(THINKFilm, R, 96 mins.) 
