..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Loman on the Totem Pole

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. Penn's levels of dismay and disillusionment on the way to utter despair are a thing of rare beauty in their delicacy and detail.

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. But after 9/11, it didn't seem like the movie would be made, for reasons large and small, despite Penn's participation. Penn appeared on Larry King Live, talking about a visit to Baghdad, and Mexican producer Jorge Vergara, a partner with Alfonso Cuarón on movies like Y tu mama tambien, was watching, and quickly signed on for the under-$10 million film. "These are both guys who want to make films that are relevant, that go at important issues. I have this list of impressive, well-known producers [including Leonard di Caprio and Alexander Payne], but on a global level, Jorge is the best known because he owns Mexico's most famous soccer team. He saw Sean on Larry King and was convinced of his conviction. He said he would feel good about making a film with him."

Working with the great cinematographer Emmanuel ("Chivo") Lubezki (Ali, Lemony Snicket, Terrence Malick's The New World), Assassination is shot with spare spatial sophistication, and the production design suggests the early 1970s without indulging in the colorful anachronism of a movie like Boogie Nights or Anchorman. Despite its relative low budget, Assassination looks remarkably unhurried. "That's Sean, and Lester, my production designer, and Chivo. The great thing about Chivo was, the first time we sat down and talked about the film, I said, 'This has got to be about as internal a film and as singular a point of view film as can be.' I talked to other cinematographers, and I had the luxury, because of Sean, of talking to a lot of impressive people. But the great thing with Chivo, was he was ready to bore into the guy, and Sean's performance. The cinematographer is the first person to watch the movie, and an actor can feel it if the cinematographer is into a movie. Sean said he could."

The understated settings and intent focus 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. "That is just sheer Sean, inspired and in the moment, that was perfect. That was like the only take we did. It was on of those little accidents that happens on the set, the trash can tripped over, and Sean, who inhabits the roles he plays, he did just what Sam Bicke would do. There's a sweetness to the character that underlies so much of where he comes form, and this deep insecurity he seems to live in. It's that connection to kindness and humanity that we're watching slip away."

As Bicke's well-intentioned confusion deteriorates, he offers up his interior crises in inappropriate contexts, like to a small business loan manager who he begins to pester like Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Bicke, like his real-life forebear, also tapes rambling messages to composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein about his beliefs and where he sees America straying, which provide context to this elliptically-structured 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-70s, every man's wearing a leisure suit. I wanted it to be accurate to be the period but not to draw attention to it. Not everybody's got the sideburns down to their elbows. By grounding 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."

There's personal history here that the director draws upon. Speaking of himself, Penn, Cuarón and Lubezki, Muller says, "We're all right around the same age," which influenced his remembrance that the 1970s had more than a little of previous decades still lying around. "But in terms of bringing details to the film, my father, until he retired, had an office furniture store in Milwaukee, and he took home movies. He brought me his super 8 film, and we found a super 8 projector, and we projected images from my father's store against the blank white wall of the [set], [production designer] Lester [Cohen] took notes on the spot, and damn, didn't he do a great job?"

He offers another 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. And my parents keep a neat household so," like a newly fabricated et, Muller says, "it could have been moved into yesterday."

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." But done with microscopic patience. "Yes, it's a moment to moment story, it's not a film that goes from point to plot point. It's a very nuanced progression or unraveling, and the film could only really succeed in a performance like Sean gives."

Sam eventually seems like he's one paycheck away from a pistol in his hand. "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."

Watching the images on television, Bicke sees a world he cannot control, nor truly even understand. It's a world made for Richard Nixon, Walter Cronkite, Monty Hall. Bicke's persecution complex grows. (But he apologizes to a bank clerk for closing his account.) The fictional version of Sam, Muller 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 festival reviewers, who take the film as a story about of failed assassin, rather than as an allegory of failed aspiration. While Muller admits that the ending has some similarities to that of Taxi Driver - aside from the bloody climax, note Sam calling his estranged wife at 10am on the dot, clutching a shabby bouquet of flowers, like the dry weeds in Travis Bickle's apartment-he thinks critics who dwell on that "need to get out more."

"I wasn't thinking of any film, really," he says. "I was especially surprised in having the film coming out now, that that would be the first avenue of comparison as opposed to a historical comparison. It's a much more interesting film that that. The two big comparisons if you've read some of the stuff, there's been a lot of mention of "Death of a Salesman", I think if anybody says it's derivative, for every parallel [to Taxi Driver] you can make you can talk about many, many more differences." In the simplest form, he says, "I think Travis Bickle is somebody who's a psychotic loner from the beginning of the film."

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 got me interesting in art was Edward 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."

January 18, 2004

- Email Ray Pride