Even ignoring the title’s annunciation of an ill-fated plot, from the moment you see Sean Penn stroll onto screen as Sam Bicke – all Chaplinesque gait and the unmistakably Lomaniacal air of failure – you’ll have little doubt that the protagonist in The Assassination Of Richard Nixon is doomed. So it proves. In Neils Mueller’s semi-fictionalised account of a botched attempt on the life of the 37th American president, Sam Bicke is depicted as an increasingly desperate individual; door-stepping his exasperated ex-wife (Naomi Watts, brunette for this week’s movie), floundering in his stiff job as an office furniture salesman and raving at his best friend (a convincingly understated Don Cheadle) about the inequities of society, particularly those he believes to have been designed with the specific purpose of arresting his own enhancement.
Bicke’s increasingly unhinged critique of the American Dream and the film’s eventual drone-goes-postal trajectory inevitably evokes Death Of A Salesman, while the failed assassination plot has brought many comparisons with Taxi Driver. In common with those works, Mr. Mueller’s film engages with Big Ideas about the ruthlessness of capitalism and the marketing of politics and fear. He deftly recreates the malaise of 1974 – demoralising news broadcasts, classic Herzog aesthetic, all-brown interiors – without overstatement or peppering the place with lava lamps (I counted only one safari suit), an approach which cannily reinforces the contemporary relevance of the Nixon era.
Oddly, the only real problem with Assassination is its star. Following similarly overcooked turns in I Am Sam and Mystic River, Sean Penn frequently plays the film’s tragicomedy as tragi-farce, mugging and twitching in a manner that suggests something unpleasant has crawled up his nostril. It proves an irritant in an otherwise fine film.