The Assassination Of Richard Nixon [DVD]

Niels Mueller's sole feature film director credit is this character study about tragic loner Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), a furniture salesman disillusioned with the dishonesty of the world he reluctantly inhabits. Loosely based on a true story, Mueller presents a convincing polemic on the back of bold characterisation. Forget subtexts and pregnant silences - Mueller's film is all about the power of expression.What it's not about is the assassination of Richard Nixon. I feel the title is not a sensible one - like Sam's slug-like boss (Jack Thompson), it's selling a different product. Do not expect a Jack Ryan-esque heroic espionage thriller. This is, after all, the grimy Land of the Free of 1974, fed on a diet of Dickie Nixon promises and apocalyptic TV visions from Vietnam. Think Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation or Scorsese's Taxi Driver for its mood. But while those films may have lacked emotional warmth, The Assassination of Richard Nixon takes our anti-hero's plight almost into the realm of sentimentality. His scenes with his wife, Marie (Naomi Watts, with whom he memorably shared the screen in the previous year's 21 Grams), are an astonishing portrayal of the agonisingly pitiful.What seems at once like an exhilarating anti-capitalist diatribe turns into something far more moving: the fable of a lonely man. ("You miss me, don't you?" and "You love me, don't you?" he asks his ex-wife's dog - two things he cannot ask his ex-wife.) But also, fascinatingly, in the final reel Bicke is revealed to be not only deeply alone but deeply unhinged. When his brother (Michael Wincott - an excellent cameo) confronts him about a theft, Sam is forced to confront himself. Sam breaks down, becoming incomprehensible, ranting about racism, displacing responsibility for his crime onto the formless enemy of the honest man. Finally, he says sorry. This scene complicates Sam; it makes him human, not simply an alien observer of the troubled human condition.Disturbing, moving, cynical, slyly witty, and - horribly predictably - devastating.

I really enjoyed this film, Sean Penn does an excellent job in my opinion. Well worth watching

Underestimated and rarely discussed film. If you work in any aspect of the sales industry, you will particularly appreciate it. And Sean Penn is one of the very best actors.

My favourite actor of all time and just brilliant in this DVD in perfect working order service and value for money just excellent a well deserved 5*

Another astonishing performance from Sean Penn showing a man's life gradually falling apart. Couldn't recommend it highly enough. 5 stars.

Very poor film. Waste of time.

This is a serious and sad story. Sean Penn is amazing. I believe every word he says.

Disappointing - not one of Mr Penn's better films :-(

“Taxi Driver” is an entertaining film, but the real deal in the loner-menace category is an obscure 2004 film, “The Assassination of Richard Nixon.” For my money, despite all the acclaim it gets, “Taxi Driver” is superficial, “technique-y,” and self-referential (it is more than anything about the director Martin Scorsese, the actor Robert De Niro, and the screenwriter Paul Schrader making a film). “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” directed and co-written by Niels Mueller, is truthful and unobtrusively artful, and it’s about the characters and what they do, not about who created them. I’m not sure it can be rented anywhere, but you can purchase a DVD of it inexpensively at Amazon. The Travis Bickle-type character in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is Samuel Bicke, portrayed brilliantly by SeanPenn, and based on a real person, a 44-year-old failed salesman named Samuel Byke, who in 1974 tried to hijack a commercial airliner and fly it into the White House to kill President Richard Nixon. Travis Bickle is alone in the world, but Samuel Bicke is more than just alone. In the eyes of everyone he has contact with, he is nothing. The taxi company wants Travis to be working there. His fellow cabbies try to get things across to him over coffee. Becky the campaign worker finds him attractive for a time, and then at the end of the film comes on to him. Iris the young prostitute gives him energy as a kind of mentor. At the end of the film, he is admired, a hero, a celebrity with laudatory newspaper clippings taped to his wall. He lives his screen life to a backdrop of the pulsating chords of Bernard Herrmann, Hollywood’s most renowned film composer. He is somebody and something. In contrast, Samuel Bicke (I’m taken by the similarity in the characters' names, Bickle and Bicke) in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is insulted by the customers he tries to sell furniture to, patronized and demeaned by his boss (a superb Jack Thompson), disowned by his brother, unwelcome and dismissed when he smilingly arrives to see his estranged wife (an equally superb Naomi Watts) and his children (she has moved on, which he can’t accept, and really, so have the children, and the family dog has no reaction when he goes to pet it), and he is sharply rebuffed by awoman he flirts with. Everyone, including the government bureaucrat who is unenthused about his small business loan application and the black activist he tries to link up with, gets it across to him that they would prefer he were somewhere other than around them. There is music in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” but it is incidental, not Bernard Herrmann dramatics; basically, Samuel Bicke lives his screen life in silence. Samuel Bicke is nobody and, in the eyes of the world, immaterial. Robert De Niro has gotten a ton of favorable notices for his portrayal of Travis Bickel, but it is showy, external. It’s Robert De Niro acting. Sean Penn’s Samuel Bicke reveals the core of this man. It’s Samuel Bicke, not Sean Penn. It is gut-wrenching and painful to experience Bicke, but at the same time it is revealing and thought provoking. And for me, unforgettable. So appropriate for these two protagonists, Travis Bickle only feigns blowing his brains out, while Samuel Bicke inthe film, as did Samuel Byke in real life, really does it. The presidential candidate Travis Bickel is bent on assassinating is present at the campaign rally that day, while Richard Nixon isn’t even in the White House the day Samuel Bicke/Bykemakes his pathetic attempt to commandeer an airliner. People can’t stop talking about Travis Bickle. Virtually no one has even heard of Samuel Bicke, or Samuel Byke. “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is indeed a grim and uncompromising film, and it is certainly not a commercial film. But those responsible for its creation can be very proud of their achievement.

Good, hope it wasn't a true one

Spätestens nach der schauspielerischen Meisterleistung von Penn in diesem Film dürfte klar sein, daß Penn erwachsen geworden ist.

'The Assassination of Richard Nixon' is fairly painful to watch, which I suppose is the point. It's about Sam Bicke, a paranoid, delusional man whose marriage has fallen apart and who simply can't make it in the modern world all culminating in his eventual attempt to assassinate Nixon via an airplane hijacking. Naturally, this is going remind you of some other films, such as 'Falling Down', 'Fight Club', 'Bruiser' and, most notably, 'Taxi Driver'. This is definitely the most naturalistic of the films, presenting his descent in a fairly straight forward, believable manner. It's different from those films, however, in that we stand outside the protagonist. (Or I did, anyway.) Certainly, we can sympathize with his plight to some degree, but his motives don't all add up. The violent outbursts in those films seem, if not really justified, at least inevitable. Here we simply see a man whose life falls apart which causes him to start spouting Marxist slogans, which generally don't have a whole lot to do with his plight, and eventually stage and assassination attempt. The connection between the two isn't completely drawn, which is probably realistic even as it makes it more difficult to relate to him. And I think this inability to fully empathize with his position makes it a weaker film than any of those I mentioned other than 'Bruiser'. But, it's interesting to see a new perspective, and this film is probably the most truthful of any of them.Sean Penn plays Bicke. Frankly, I've always found him to be an overrated actor. Most of the time he just frowns and mutters, which is pretty much how he acts in real life, from what I've seen. I've seen him do some more impressive stuff lately, however, such as in '21 Grams', and he's very good here. Bicke is interesting in that he is a very principled man, far more so than the average modern man, as far as I can tell. He is incredibly uncomfortable with deception of any kind, yet he is also a sales man. Not a good combination. More significantly his marriage is falling apart, though he doesn't seem prepared to admit it. The scenes between him and his wife Marie (played by Naomi Watts with an ugly brunette dye-job, or wig, perhaps) are remarkably embarrassing; She clearly has absolutely no interest in seeing him or listening to anything he has to say, but she pities him enough that she can't quite tell him to go to hell. And he is, of course, completely oblivious to all of this. These problems fuel one another, as Bicke imagines that he can win his wife back should he succeed in business, but he is so ill-equipped to deal with the business world that he just further degrades and humiliates himself while fueling his hopeless desire for reconciliation. And that's what this film comes down to-- We simply watch Bicke embarrass himself again and again: His bosses are condescending and inhuman; He is hopelessly graceless on the sales floor, particularly when he tries to flirt with a female customer; He comes up with a ridiculous idea for a mobile tire store which leads to some acts of thievery on his part, all while he is spewing poorly conceived anti-capitalist invectives pretty much whenever he gets frustrated. The film is particularly interested in that it provides the contrary positions. Bicke airs his various grievances to Marie and his best friend Bonny, but they won't hear much of it. `That's life' they say, pretty much. They have all the same problems he has, but they're getting by.I should note that this film is actually quite extraordinarily funny at moments, but it's a sad, embarrassed kind of humor. Needless to say, we are laughing at Bicke at these moments. The scene where he goes to a Black Panther headquarters has one really riotously funny line, which I will not spoil.Eventually, Bicke loses all rationality and decides to kill Nixon, who he sees as a representation of all the hollowness of the modern world. True to form, the film ends more in farce than tragedy, as his plan is hopelessly ill-conceived. (Well, it's got some tragedy to, but it's mostly just another grand failure on Bicke's part) It does have a certain intensity, however, and Penn is very good in these scenes, barely concealing his panic underneath exaggerated rage.To be blunt, the film is a little slow and drawn out despite it's fairly short length. It gets a bit repetitious, frankly. Also, it's a little sad that we never get to learn who Bicke was before and just what it is that went wrong. The film opens a year before the assassination attempt, but things have already gone to hell by this point. The dissolution of his marriage seems to be at the root of his eventual madness, but we don't know quite why this happens. I dunno if he'd have been alright, precisely, had his family staid together, but he wouldn't have gone of the edge. We kind of assume that Bicke wasn't always such a sniveling loser, cause if he were he wouldn't have gotten married in the first place, but we don't quite know what went wrong or why or how he changed. We know he has problems with keeping jobs, but that really doesn't seem to be the major cause of the divorce. The point may well be that there is no reason. I dunno. But I was definitely curious about it.Anyway, that's it. This is a sad movie. Normally I'd call a movie depressing, but that isn't quite the case here. Again, you feel sorry for Bicke, but you can't totally get inside him, so it's not as personally affecting as it might have been. In the end, it's almost a little reaffirming. In the end I thought, `I may be a loser, but I'm no Sam Bicke.'Grade: B+

This story is a soulful look at what happens when a person has no support base in their adult lives. That said, this is not a feel-good movie. It ends with the death of at least three lives and is probably a very good demonstration of the short-sighted power that is given to a person who finds himself wielding a loaded weapon.I was very impressed with the depth the film makers gave Penn's character; though I understand that events leading up to the ending of a true event were fictionalized, they came very close to making the whole story real. And, Penn gave us the person in what might be his best performance.The entertainment value of this motion picture is debatable. The film did cause me to react in much the same way as I would upon seeing a terrible traffic accident and, if that was what they were aiming to elicit in their audience, they succeeded with me. I was saddened and dumb-struck. I have yet to come to a satisfying answer other than that this is why we have social programs and religious institutions in our societies: we all have the potential of misfiring without them.