‘Nixon’

‘Nixon’

Baltimore, 1974: Sam Bicke talks a lot. He knows what he thinks and why the world is wrong. He sells office supplies poorly; his marriage is ending; the bank won’t give him a loan; Nixon is still in the White House and the Black Panthers are being persecuted it’s all part of the same rage that’s coiled inside him for years.

Sean Penn plays Bicke as a man who has always been socially inept and now, as his life falls apart around him, loses his mind. Other people’s evil and his own frustrations are all one thing, somebody else’s fault, so we see him in an airport parking garage with a pistol stuck inside a leg brace. One more tape goes into an airport mailbox on its way to Leonard Bernstein. He wants to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House.

There really was a Sam Bicke (spelled Byck), whose plan failed too. The botched assassination scheme is by Niels Mueller and co-writer Kevin Kennedy; everything else including some scenes of mordant humor is them. This isn’t history but character study not just of any marginal but of someone who went off the rails completely yet while watching “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” I wrote down over and over again: Sean Penn.

Penn does madness brilliantly because he does sanity first; he gets how daily life itself can be for some people challenge after challenge to rigid ideas about right and wrong.

Take Sam’s job at Jack Jones Office Supplies. Among other things, they sell chairs that are covered in Naugahyde. The client asks if they’re leather. “No,” Sam says. Then his boss explains they’re “Naugahyde-covered leather.” “Oh,” says the client. When Sam offers a client 5 percent off (from his own commission) to close a sale, Jack calls him into his office and screams at him for selling the desk at a loss, which makes no sense to Sam. Then the client comes in and thanks Sam for selling it so cheap. Sam is trying to do right by this world that doesn’t match up, but he can’t figure out how.

He becomes obsessed with Nixon: “He made us a promise he didn’t deliver. Then he sold us on the exact same promise and he got elected again. “So offended by his job’s inherent dishonesty, Sam goes to the local Black Panther office to make a donation; there he gives a speech about renaming them the Zebras (to include black and white) and admitting white members (like himself).

Marie (Naomi Watts), his wife, has left him with their two daughters. He dreams of saving his marriage. She can’t make him understand it’s over. So Marie serves him with divorce papers one day when she knows he’ll be out of town. At home alone, Sam talks to the family dog: “You love me, don’t you?” The dog looks like it couldn’t care less.

Sam wants to start a wheel service with his best friend, Bonny Simmons (Don Cheadle). But that takes money. Sam and Bonny are bad risks. The Small Business Administration drags its feet on the paperwork, and Sam keeps explaining why he needs the loan so much and how quickly it has to come.

Penn shows anger in small, contained details. He is one of our great actors; he can make minor characters major because their lives matter so much to themselves. Was it Penn or the filmmakers who thought of the touch where Sam puts on a false mustache in the airport parking lot? Why? Nobody knows him or knows what he looks like, and if his plan works there will be no Sam Bicke left, mustache or not.

Penn shows him always outside. Kept out of his house. Turned away by the bank. Not qualified for the Black Panthers. The outsider at work, listening to his boss and a co-worker snicker about him behind his back. The only person he can talk to is Leonard Bernstein, whose music he loves (the real Bernstein got tapes from Byck but was mystified by being attached even distantly to a hijacking).

“The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is about a man on a collision course; given the stark terms in which he arranges right and wrong, he will sooner or later crack up. He hasn’t any idea what’s appropriate behavior, how others see him; what may be right but is impossible never occurs to him. The movie’s title has one effect before we see it and another afterward when we can see what grandiosity and self-deceit it implies: What really happens is that Sam Bicke assassinates himself.

Does the film have a message? I don’t think it wants one. It’s about watching a man go mad which means it’s just an observation of character; that’s enough. A message would feel tacked on and gratuitous.

Our opinions of Nixon, Vietnam and the Black Panthers are beside the point; they enter the movie only as objects of Bicke’s obsessions. We cannot help sensing a connection with another 1970s would be assassin, another obsessed loner, Travis Bickle. Travis pours out his thoughts in journals; Sam uses tapes. They have to justify themselves but don’t have anybody to listen.

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