Fleshing out some of my earlier
quickie reviews:
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
I don't grade films, but if I did, this one would get an A+ for doing what it sets out to do so well that I can't imagine it better. But the material chosen by director and co-writer Niels Mueller for his first feature is so discomforting that I doubt this film will be widely seen, despite one of the best performances of Sean Penn's career.
Samuel Byck (spelled "Bicke" in the film; more on that in a moment) was a real historical figure who, in 1974, tried to assassinate President Richard Nixon by hijacking a 747 and crashing it into the White House. In an irony that is emblematic of Byck's entire existence, history has largely forgotten him. Even in the Stephen Sondheim musical
Assassins, where Byck appears with more famous figures like John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, Jr., Byck gets no respect. He doesn't even get a song, just a couple of shrieking monologues played for comic relief (and based on actual tape recordings that Byck left behind).
Mueller's film closely follows the events in Byck's life immediately preceding his failed assassination attempt, but Mueller makes some interesting changes. First of all, he changes the spelling of Byck's name to bring it closer to a famous fictional assassin from the same time period, Travis Bickle. Like Travis, the Bicke of the film is so completely disconnected from people around him that he frequently has no idea what they're talking about. In both
Taxi Driver and
AORN, you watch these men intently engage in conversations about which they clearly have no clue, but no one notices because they sit there looking earnest. The difference is that Sean Penn doesn't give Bicke the crackling energy that Robert DeNiro brought to Travis. Through some actor's trick that's so skilled you can't see it, Penn makes Bicke into the human equivalent of a black hole: a non-space into which emotion, energy and ultimately reason just disappear. Even when he's about to commit murder, Bicke never seems to be anything but a schlub -- which makes the violence he ultimately commits all the more shocking for its casual banality.
Consistent with this approach, Mueller's script also leaves out some of the more extreme behavior that characterized Byck's life and that might give the audience some relief, comic or otherwise. The real Byck picketed the White House dressed as Santa Claus. Sean Pean's Bicke doesn't do anything so publicly extravagant. He does, however, dictate tape-recorded letters to Leonard Bernstein, with whom Byck/Bicke felt a special kinship after listening to his music. Sondheim's musical shows the same thing, and what's comic on stage becomes disturbing in the film, because Sean Penn perfectly captures the irrational certainty of a deluded fan who truly believes that an artist he's never met is speaking
directly to him.
Mueller also chooses to focus on just one of the many jobs that the real Byck tried and failed at. In the film, he's trying to be a salesman. Now, a salesman-protagonist in an American story can't help but invoke another American loser, Willy Loman, but here the invocation is ironic. Compared to Bicke, Loman was a raging success. Bicke not only can't close a sale, but he doesn't even know how to talk to people. His boss, Jack (played with sly relish by Australian actor Jack Thompson), alternately encourages and torments him with pep talks loaded with positive-thinking cliches, but Bicke is so completely out of step with the rest of the world that no matter how closely he reads and tries to emulate the self-help books Jack shoves his way, it's a waste of time.
In the world of the film, it's salesmanship that finally inspires Bicke to target Richard Nixon, who's constantly appearing on TV screens in the background. In a memorable speech, Jack tells Bicke that Nixon's two presidential campaigns established him as the greatest salesman in America. Jack means it as encouragement, but he inadvertently ends up focusing Bicke on Nixon as the epitome of all that's wrong with his life and the world.
Nothing else in Bicke's life anchors him. His ex-wife, played by Naomi Watts, wants no part of him. His only friend, played by Don Cheadle, becomes the victim of Bicke's attempt to open a tire dealership with stolen merchandise, and his brother, played by an almost unrecognizable Michael Wincott, has clearly given up any hope that Sam will ever be anything but an embarrassment.
Bicke is already so withdrawn and alienated when we first meet him that it's hard to imagine him becoming more so. Somehow, though, Sean Penn makes Bicke visibly withdraw even more as the film progresses -- until finally, at the end, he virtually disappears before our eyes. As it was in history, the assassination plot is ill-conceived and ineptly executed. When the violence comes, it's not cathartic as it was in
Taxi Driver; it's just stupid. And yet people get killed.
AORN is the most uncompromising portrait of a loser I have ever seen. There is no bright spot, no respite, no hint of grace in any part of the film's roughly 90-minute running time. You're forced to share the company of someone who's lost beyond redemption and who you probably wouldn't even want to see redeemed. But people like Bicke exist. They change lives. With a lucky break or two, they can change history. If we try to pretend they don't exist, they'll find a way to remind us. As was said of Willy Loman, "attention must be paid".
M.
Even less happens (we're almost talking Gerry-like amounts of plot), but it's strangely fulfilling.
