The Outsiders
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Niels Mueller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon, about a soon-to-be-divorced, lower-middle-class office-furniture salesman named Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn) who comes to blame Richard Nixon for all his problems, will be deservedly praised for its dedicated performances and expressive direction. I suspect it will also be backhandedly dismissed in some quarters as an extended riff on Martin Scorsese's early masterwork Taxi Driver, a searing portrait of a fictional Vietnam vet, cabdriver and vigilante Travis Bickle that became the cultural touchstone for every Pariah-Revenge picture that followed.
It's a superficially valid comparison but not quite fair to Mueller, because it presupposes that Scorsese and Taxi Driver co-writer Paul Schrader said all there was to say about unhinged urban loners, and any further exploration of the topic therefore amounts to a rehash, a tribute or a flat-out copy, rather than an artist's respectful reply across the decades, which is not only permissible but desirable.
It's also worth noting that Bicke's dark odyssey predated Taxi Driver by two years and, along with the biography of George Wallace's attempted assassin Paul Bremer and other real-life pariahs, might have colored its narrative. Mueller's real-life inspiration was former Baltimore tire salesman Samuel Byck, who stormed a jet with a pistol and a homemade gasoline bomb and unsuccessfully tried to hijack it and crash it into the White House. He managed to kill two people and wound a third before shooting himself. (He was also a character in Stephen Sondheim's Assassins.)
In Assassination, the general outline of the story is consistent with reality, and with the outlines of Scorsese's classic. Accidentally or on purpose, the Assassination filmmakers invite Taxi Driver comparisons by framing the story inside Bicke's voice over narration (mostly in the form of tape-recorded messages he dictated to composer Leonard Bernstein) and by changing the protagonist's last name from Byck to Bicke.
The film is strewn with what seem like direct visual references to what critic Robert Kolker calls "The Cinema of Loneliness," a 1970s-forged school of filmmaking typified by the likes of Scorsese. Mueller references both throughout, especially in the stunning final sequence where Bicke loiters in an airport lounge and then storms the plane. Mueller, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and editor Jay Lash Cassidy build tension with a combination of tight close-ups of Bicke and jaggedly edited snap-zooms to whatever he happens to be looking at (often the fluorescent panels on the ceiling); the devices aren't an exact reference to Brian De Palma's The Untouchables and Blow Out, but they're visually and spiritually attuned. And during the bloody climax, there's a controlled left-to-right dolly shot, moving from a long shot of mayhem in the cockpit to reveal security storming the skyway, that echoes a similar shot in Taxi Driver in the scene where Travis tries to call Betsy on a pay phone and the camera dollies from left to right, away from him, finally settling on an empty hall. In both Assassination and Taxi Driver, these shots are emotionally attuned paradoxes: they look deeper by looking away.
Mueller's film isn't as rich and disturbing as Scorsese's, mainly because Scorsese and Schrader made every character contradictory, eccentric and ultimately unclassifiable, Travis first and foremost (he says his body is a temple, yet he smokes, drinks and pops pills; he gripes that the city has become a cesspool yet frequents porno houses, and so forth). In weaker moments, Mueller and cowriter Kevin Kennedy's script makes like an undergraduate playwright's senior thesis project and neatly pins the characters to their jobs and social strata like solid-colored coats hung on clearly labeled racks.
Penn's Samuel Bicke sometimes comes off as a homicidal sad-sack capitalist victim, almost a Willy Loman type. "I consider myself a grain of sand on this beach called America," Bicke yammers into his Dictaphone early in the movie; later, he unfortunately murmurs, "Nobody thinks Sam Bicke is gonna make it." His ex-wife Marie, played by Naomi Watts, is the prototypical 1970s divorced young mom, liberated by social change but imprisoned by her need to find a new man who can support her; Don Cheadle's garage mechanic Bonny Simmons, Bicke's best friend, is too much the dark-skinned representative of true outsiderhood who has resolved to smile and go along to get along.
(In the name of greater political precision, Mueller should have more clearly linked Bicke's affinity for black power-hilariously demonstrated in a scene where he fumblingly tries to join the Black Panthers-to Bicke's own ethnicity, which he denies by not acknowledging. The only early clue that Bicke is Jewish comes in a fleeting glimpse of his Orthodox Jewish brother and former employer, played by Michael Wincott.)
Bicke's boss at the furniture store, played with ebullient confidence by Jack Thompson, is a grinning thug who has bought into the up-by-your-bootstraps mythology, and tries to resell it to the skeptical Bicke by forcing him to study and memorize an audio version of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. He's like a Joseph Heller or Thomas Pynchon satire of a 1970s American businessman, which would be fine if the movie were more satirical and less grittily realistic.
Despite these severe handicaps, Mueller's movie is still powerful-like Taxi Driver, a slow burn that accumulates force as it goes along. Mueller draws you into Mueller's morally slipshod, self-pitying world view through clever subjective filmmaker devices, including a particular kind of reaction shot perfected in Michael Mann's The Insider-an oft-repeated, semi-silhouetted reaction shot, taken from immediately behind Bicke's shoulder, which frames whoever's lecturing Bicke inside the "L" formed by Bicke's shoulder and the side of his face. It's a superb image because it suggests that when Bicke is being talked down to-and forced to sit there and take it-he feels like a non-person, a shadow, a disembodied ear into which wisdom can be poured.
Penn's sensitive but exact performance elaborates on these ideas and others. He carries himself like a man who's been beaten in every imaginable way-as if his body, indeed his soul, is bruised. And he talks in a mashed-up conversational mumble, like a man who's not accustomed to being heard, much less listened to. He seems a real person in a world of types-a contrast that makes sense in context because Assassination, like Taxi Driver, Affliction, One Hour Photo and other Pariah-Revenge pictures, is told largely through the eyes of its quietly demented protagonist, but which ultimately denies the film the greatness to which it clearly aspires. But if it's not a great movie, it's often amazing.
Thanks to Penn's performance and Mueller's mostly clean, purposeful direction, The Assassination of Richard Nixon walks a very thin line between understanding its helpless, destructive hero and lionizing him, and it never steps across that line. This remarkable feat is enough to earn the movie a place of honor in any discussion of Pariah-Revenge pictures, from Taxi Driver onward. At its best, Mueller's film plays like Taxi Driver reversed-taking a micro rather than a macro view of its hero, and flipping Scorsese's devices (voice-over, overtly formalist filmmaking techniques) so that they truly tell the story from the inside out, rather than merely seeming to.