The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle
Directed by Niels Muller

REVIEW -- Some have branded The Assassination of Richard Nixon as Taxi Driver meets Death of a Salesman. They would be correct.

I'm not sure whether it's a credit to or condemnation of Sean Penn's portrayal of Sam Bicke that people in the screening I attended tittered at some parts of his character's emotional disintegration and then gasped in shock at his violent final acts.

The character's name is close to Travis Bickle, the damaged loner and would-be assassin in Taxi Driver, a 1976 Martin Scorsese film. But the last name of the real-life Sam – who aspired to crash a jetliner into the White House – was Byck.

We meet Bicke as his life's downward spiral is just starting to accelerate. The time is early 1974, a time of inflation, oil shocks, radicalism and the beginning of the end of the presidency of Richard Milhous Nixon.

Sam is separated from his cocktail waitress wife (Naomi Watts). He left his last job as a salesman for his brother's tire company. Besides getting back together with Marie and their three kids, his big dream is to open a mobile tire repair business with his friend Bonny, a black man (Don Cheadle).

But Sam views virtually every compromise that success in American business requires as soul-destroying.

When his new boss Jack (brilliantly played by Australian Jack Thompson) at an office furniture store tells him he should cut off his moustache, Sam is torn up (perhaps he didn't know there are executives who have willingly grown facial hair in order to fit in better with their new bosses). "But Marie, I grew it for you," he tells her – not picking up on the fact that for her, that means nothing at this point. But for once, he compromises and slices it off.

In order to start his new business, Sam needs a loan. In speaking with a government loan officer, he gives a very earnest, very spooky speech about how his brother would make him "lie" to customers and how he would be honest with them, even though his price would work out to be about the same. "But it's the same thing," the loan officer said with just the faintest grin. "No it isn't," Sam replied, clearly delighted to be debating the issue but frustrated the loan officer can't see his point. And again, not aware he was making himself look really, really unstable.

Sam had a major emotional investment in the loan going through, and he starts making a nuisance of himself at the loan office.

Instead of getting a letter approving his loan, he first gets one telling him the state has dissolved his marriage to Marie. Then the loan application is predictably rejected.

Mr. Honesty in Business steals an invoice from his brother's company and uses it to fraudulently buy 550 tires and have them sent to Bonny's shop.

This prompts a visit from Julius (played by Toronto-born Michael Wincott) to tell Sam that while he'll fix this mess (Bonny was the one arrested), he disowns him. A bawling Sam tells Julius he would have paid him back and that he was turned down for a loan because "they were racists."

Nixon only appears in the movie on TV screens. In one of Nixon's early appearances in the film, Sam's destined-to-be-ex-boss says Nixon was the greatest salesman in America because he sold the people on ending the Vietnam War – twice.

As Sam was losing his office sales job, Tricky Dick showed up on the TV sets, prompting a screaming fit by Sam.

At one point in the film, Sam is waiting around his old house to meet (stalk?) Marie, when he sees her coming back from a date with a man who drives a Cadillac, that 1970s symbol of material success.

Sitting alone in his apartment in front of the TV, Cadillac ads taunt him, no doubt reminding Sam of what he has lost and might never have again.

Instead of listening to Dale Carnegie-style self-improvement tapes, he narrates an audio letter to composer Leonard Bernstein, saying how he saw himself as one of 211 million grains of sand in the U.S., and how he wanted to show the powerful that "we have the power to destroy them."

This movie is at times painful to watch because you're watching someone's life fall apart. For some, Penn's performance might come perilously close to overacting, thus accounting for the audience's inappropriate yuks.

It is largely a Penn project, although director and co-writer Niels Mueller gets fine, and in some cases outstanding, performances out of all his main actors. The general feeling of ennui that hung over the U.S. at that time (my, how things change!) is captured here.

At 95 minutes, it is a compact but intense film. Those who like powerful psychological dramas will undoubtedly like this one – and upon leaving the theatre, might well ask why no one ever suggested Sam see a psychiatrist.