January 20-26, 2005

movies

Death of a Salesman

driven mad: Sean Penn's Sam Bicke goes over the edge in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Sean Penn's disenfranchised family man sets his sights on the president.

by Cindy Fuchs

"Just tell them that. Tell them my reasons, tell them why." During the first moments of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Sam Bicke (Sean Penn) speaks into his tape recorder. Addressing the man he admires most, "maestro" Leonard Bernstein, he asks for compassion and connection, to be remembered and explained. Because he feels like a "grain of sand," constrained and even "punished" by a cruel hierarchy that keeps him from achieving an American Dream, Sam asks Bernstein to tell his story for him, knowing that he will not return from his mission — namely, to kill the president.

Sam's plan, undertaken in 1974, is at once elaborate and myopic: He means to hijack a plane from BWI Airport in Baltimore and crash it into the White House (a plan he shares with the real Sam Byck, on whom Assassination's protagonist is loosely based). His target seems obvious to Sam. With the Watergate hearings a daily fixture on television, the president reminds Sam incessantly of his own personal and professional failures. Even as Sam is unable to grasp basic elements of salesmanship at the office furniture store where he works, Nixon appears on multiple screens, a wholly effective salesman who has, as Sam's employer notes, sold precisely the same story to voters two years in a row: that he would end the war in Vietnam.

In the face of such deception and gullibility, Sam ponders his own situation. He can't sell Naugahyde chairs; can't get a loan to start his dream company (a mobile tire supply, using a repainted school bus for deliveries); his tire salesman brother Julius (Michael Wincott) rejects him; and his wife, Marie (Naomi Watts), divorces him, taking their three children to live with another man (who drives a Cadillac, sign of all things excessive and unattainable). Sam's boss, Jack (Jack Thompson), initially tells him he "smells" like success, hands him how-to books by Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale ("You gotta believe," he oozes), but Sam can't abide the lies he sees as the basis of "success." Peering into his own future, he sees only perpetual disappointment and loss.

Increasingly incapable of moderating his own behavior, Sam flips channels until he lands on an interview with Black Panther David Hilliard asserting the right of the "masses" to self-determination despite political processes. Moved to action and hoping to connect, Sam heads to the local Black Panther Party office, where he meets with Harold (Mykelti Williamson). "I know what it's like to be lied to and to not be respected and to be treated like a great big nothing," he insists. And so, he offers money ($107) and, not a little ironically, marketing advice: a new name for the group that is not intimidating but inclusive: "the 'ebras," that is, black and white. Harold nods, takes his money, and thanks him.

Though Sam hopes, impossibly, that he can win Marie back, she's alarmed and troubled by his clinginess and his dropping by the house unannounced (in violation of their separation agreement). Eventually, she stops taking his calls and completes the paperwork for their divorce, sending Sam over his own odd deep end. Invited home to dinner by his best friend and potential business partner Bonny (Don Cheadle), Sam presses too hard, showing the cracks when he asks Bonny's son Joey (Derek Greene) how he'd feel if his father "went away." Bonny and his wife (April Grace) shift in their seats then send Joey to bed, exchanging looks as Sam, so sad, hugs the boy a beat too long.

Sam's utter lack of understanding doesn't keep him from trying repeatedly to make contact. His pronouncements to his idol Bernstein (who famously contributed to the Panthers) are underscored throughout the film by the maestro's compositions on the soundtrack. "If I am lucky, the action that I am about to take will show the powerful that even the least grain of sand has in him the power to destroy them."

Sam's loneliness leads to more television watching, his only link to an outside world. In addition to car ads and Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech, he sees news concerning the standoff at Wounded Knee and, eventually, the landing of a helicopter on the White House lawn by a disgruntled Army helicopter mechanic, Pfc. Robert Preston. And Sam is struck by an idea, a seemingly simple and legible way to make his discontent known.

Even as Sam unravels, the film doesn't judge him but rather adopts his perspective, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's remarkably agile camera always watching him, steadily and too closely. This proximity not only reveals Sam's turmoil (and no one shows psychic gears grinding as effectively as Penn) but also asks viewers to reconsider their own part in such loss, the ways that those overlooked might be noticed rather than rejected.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon Directed by Niels Mueller A ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse recommended