The Outsider

Sean Penn plays failed assassin Sam Bicke in The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Photo by Phil Bray. Courtesy THINKFilm

In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins, would-be Nixon-killer and seminal American loser Sam Byck did a soft shoe next to fellow presidential assassins, failed and triumphant. In all likelihood, you didn’t know that. Only a few history buffs and fewer Sondheim fans remember Byck at all. That no one remembers him is, according to the film The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the big tragedy boxing the smaller bungled hijacking (he wanted to fly a plane into the White House; how prescient). His failure to leave an impression on the world ate Byck alive, and he went mad from isolation. Perhaps this is why writer-director Niels Mueller has the filmic Byck spell his name Bicke – a gesture that conjures Travis Bickle, the iconic loner assassin in Taxi Driver.

But was the tragedy entirely internal, or did it have something to do with the American mood in 1974, that lengthy moment of crisis book-ended by the Tet Offensive and Watergate? The Assassination of Richard Nixon doesn’t seem to have a clue how Bicke got where he did, it simply loves that he got there. Mueller revels in Bicke’s solipsism to such an extent that, for a finely crafted period piece – bell-bottoms and low riding cars abound – the film seems weirdly out of time, yet another portrait of an American outsider. Bicke could be Travis Bickle, or for that matter Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, but at no point does he seem like a real person; he’s a cinematic American outsider.

Bicke is a struggling salesman: Willy Loman with firearms; walking sadness in a cheap suit. It’s the kind of showboat role that Sean Penn – so strong, so comfortable last year in Mystic River – likes to waste himself on from time to time. Remember the Starbucks-shilling mentally challenged daddy in I Am Sam? Nixon is nowhere near as appalling, but Penn’s performance suffers a similar fit of distracting, very loud envelope-pushing as if to say: This is edgy, edgy stuff, man. Edg-ay.

Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. Photo by Phil Bray. Courtesy THINKFilm

Bicke has a caterpillar moustache and a one-beat-behind smile. He’s needy, whiny and unequivocally pathetic. His soon to be ex-wife, Marie (Naomi Watts), regards his unannounced visits with exasperated pity, but mostly anger, and why not? Bicke is shrill, a perpetual victim with a violent streak: he yells and punches furniture. Of course, a man needs to vent, especially when his boss (Jack Thompson) at the office furniture store is a masochist who humiliates him daily and forces him to read Dale Carnegie. Bicke invests all his hope for freedom in a quarter-baked business plan: a traveling tire shop in a school bus. But government bureaucrats get in the way, and as one degradation piles upon the next, Bicke starts grasping for any philosophy to give shape to the mess that is his life. In tapes he sends to his hero, Leonard Bernstein, Bicke gripes about Nixon – who pops up on television repeatedly, droning on from beneath his needle nose – and imagines a place for himself in the Civil Rights movement; his sole friend is a black mechanic (Don Cheadle). In one excruciating scene, Bicke visits an office of the Black Panthers and helpfully suggests a name change: “Zebras. You’ll double your membership!” His obliviousness to convention, and his toddler-ish, me-only point of view, is reminiscent of the famous scene in Taxi Driver where Bickle takes WASP princess Betsy to a porn movie. He is genuinely stunned that she’s offended because he is a man who does not know how things work. Bicke’s problem is that he thinks he knows how things work, it’s just that nothing is working in his favour.

Though the period details are painstakingly spot-on – Penn clearly adores wearing his porny moustache, and the cheap furnishings that line all rooms look sad and disposable – there is no sense of foreboding in Nixon, as there is in Taxi Driver; no cultural apocalypse is at stake. The Nixon portraits that hang everywhere, barely commented upon, come to seem like mere set dressing, generic signifiers of “badness.” And the Zebras scene is played way too funny, even if it is true (I don’t know whether or not it’s embellishment). Movie loners like Edwards and Bickle were war veterans, men who could not re-enter normal life after battle, seeing “normal” thereafter as absurd, deranged. There’s a dissonance between their perspective and the world’s: a fragile, dangerous space where tragedy is born. But what was the source of Bicke’s illness? What separated him from all the other maligned, solitary working men in the world? Mueller implies that it was mere proximity to a society in chaos, but there is no post-’60s political fever in Nixon; no sense of any disorder except in Bicke’s own head.

In the end, we’re left to presume that Bicke was simply a crazy paranoiac, a nutjob, a whacko (and Jewish, an odd insertion at film’s end that means what? A persecution complex?). Certainly, one man’s madness is a tragedy – particularly for the innocent people who die at his hand – but in this case, it doesn’t make compelling fiction. The Assassination of Richard Nixon is a chic and self-important tribute to grainy American movies of the ’70s, proving that Mueller is an expert stylist, and a well-versed student of the cinema. He knows his movie loners, but sadly, he doesn’t know Sam Bicke, and so, neither do we.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.