Ray Pride

One paycheck away from infamy: that's the unforeseeable fate of frustrated, increasingly isolated salesman Sam Bicke in "The Assassination of Richard Nixon."

Sean Penn's performance as a historically based figure who failed in an attempt to hijack a plane and crash it into the Nixon White House is the intense, sorrowful center of Milwaukee-born Niels Muller's debut as a writer-director.

A longtime collaborator of producer-director Gary Winick ("Tadpole"), the 43-year-old screenwriter got Penn's interest after he and co-writer Kevin Kennedy finished the script in 1999. After 9/11, it didn't seem like the movie would be made, for reasons large and small, despite Penn's participation. But after Penn appeared on "Larry King Live," talking about his visit to Baghdad, Mexican producer Jorge Vergara, owner of Mexico's most popular soccer team and partner with Alfonso Cuaron, signed on for the under-$10 million film.

Working with the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki ("Ali," "Lemony Snicket," Terrence Malick's "The New World"), "Assassination" is made with uncommon spatial sophistication, and the production design suggests the early 1970s without the jokey anachronism of a movie like "Anchorman." It's an understated setting that ideally suits Bicke's disintegration as someone who cannot tell the lies necessary to be a salesman, whose estrangement from his wife (Naomi Watts) and three children make him increasingly agitated. (Penn finds peculiar and telling bits of performance that speak profoundly of his solitariness and his inability to live up to his received notion of the American Dream, including a scene where he loses his temper and essentially winds up "apologizing" with a few small gestures... to a trash can.)

As his well-intentioned confusion deteriorates, Bicke offers up his interior crises in inappropriate contexts like to a small-business loan manager who he begins to stalk; he also makes tape-recorded messages to the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein about his aspirations, which provide context to this elliptically structured but sometimes lyrical chamber drama. While the ending has parallels to that of "Taxi Driver," Muller says "All the President's Men" was one of the 1970s touchstones for the film's look and feel. "We watched that a few times getting ready to shoot this. When you look at films that are set in the 1970s that have been done after the 1970s, they're hyper-seventies--every man's wearing a leisure suit. I wanted it to be accurate to the period but not to draw attention to it. Not everybody's got the sideburns down to their elbows. By grounding it in a more real seventies, I think the film winds up being more timelessly connected to today. It's not trying to strictly look back at a period."

He offers an example of how the approach works for him. "My parents are still living in the house I grew up in suburban Milwaukee, and I remember lying sick on the couch in the living room. I have a memory for each piece of furniture, like this reproduction of a painting above one sofa. I think it's some European street setting. I used to look at it and imagine what it would be like if I could jump into that painting and walk with those people. I so much wanted to enter that picture. I still have those memories."

While he appreciates a comparison to Arthur Miller's downtrodden everyman in "Death of a Salesman," Willy Loman, Muller also thinks "Sam could be the guy next door. Us, or a hyper-version of us."

One paycheck away from a pistol in his hand? I ask. "Yeah. Sam can feel grounded and normal, the next moment he doesn't. But his problems are our problems. One of the significant differences [between Bicke and "Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle] was that it was important for me to have Sam's relationship with his intended target to be the same relationship we have to our public figures: through television. I hadn't seen that pulled off in a film."

The fictional version of Sam, he thinks, had such hope. "If he chose to unpack the boxes stacked up in the dining room for 18 months or what it is, it could be a home. What's especially tragic are the choices that he really still has at the time he makes this horrendous choices."

The controversial material has rankled some early festival reviewers, who've taken the film as a portrait of a failed assassin, rather than as an allegory of failed aspiration. Muller faults cautious "groupthink." "It's bizarre to me. Somebody told me about a review where they'd written about the movie's pluses and negatives, and the negatives were that it was depressing," he says. "Film's the only art form where there's this notion. Plays, Shakespeare, people talk about the tragedies ahead of the comedies. The first painter who got me interesting in art was Edvard Munch. In music, the Beatles, you can talk about pure pop, but there's also have songs that go toward melancholy, `While my Guitar gently weeps.' "That's just my taste in films or music. I'll take `Strawberry Fields' over `Penny Lane' any day." Look at Nirvana, you have angst and sadness, it evokes something." Film remains a thornier issue. "Maybe it's because it's such an expensive medium. I can understand the financiers having their reluctance, but that's why we need a really truly independent cinema in this country now."

"The Assassination of Richard Nixon" opens Friday.

(2005-01-11)

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