No way to bomb the White House

The Assassination of Richard Nixon misses the mark of a true tragedy, which always leaves room for nobility

by Junius

Nixon wasn't assassinated, so the film's title The Assassination of Richard Nixon sums up the futile wishful thinking of its chief character. It wouldn't be so bad if we could keep a distance from the futility and see the failure after failure as just a bit comical, perhaps—as one scene almost is, where our white hero tries to join the Black Panthers and suggests the name could be changed to Zebras.

That scene and others could have been both funny and telling, but the director won't let us get outside of the pathetic Sean Penn character, and Sean Penn won't help the director by offering us some moments when he isn't in pain or about to be. Sean Penn is so great an actor that he won't release his claws. You have to feel with him or get out of the theatre.

So this film doesn't work as social satire, though presumably it was meant to. The assertion is there, embedded in this tale of alienation: In the 1970s, capitalism became criminal in its greed and callously hypocritical in its sales pitch promising that all could share in its wealth. This message is splintered into TV image bites where Nixon's face is supposed to say it all.

And that would work except for the fact we have to suffer with a twitchy, self-defeating person, more ego than principle, who isn't shown to be defeated by the system so much as by his own pigheaded over-sensitivity. A man loonier by the minute is not a good spokesperson for revolutionary ideas. So The Assassination of Richard Nixon is unbearable . Don't see it. You won't enjoy any of if.

Arthur Miller died the week this film came out. The Death of a Salesman is the prototype. How can one identify with someone who wants to be rich in the all-American way but just can't make it? It's excruciating to watch. Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, it's unbearable. Tragedy was not meant to be unbearable. A certain nobility is supposed to shine through.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon is not Sean Penn's fault. Penn knows what true tragedy is. He proved it in a film he directed (and also co-produced) called The Pledge. He was wise enough to get Jack Nicholson to play the role of a long-service cop who even in retirement won't let go of a bad child-molester homicide case where he believes they got the wrong man.

At great risk to a new love relationship, he sets up his fiancée's daughter as bait. She has been approached before, and he knows, really knows, this is the guy. But the murderer doesn't show up to take the bait, and the Jack Nicholson character loses everything: his new family and the respect of his old police colleagues who came to help. He loses his mind too, because his whole lifetime of police work told him he had it right.

He sinks into an inner space where he can only keep asking himself what went wrong. But he was right, and noble in his intentions. It should have worked. It's just that he couldn't (and still can't at the end) think of the one thing that would make his trap fail. And that's what the Greeks called Fate. The child-murderer was driving to the rendezvous and a logging truck ran into him on a curve. He fried in his car, his purpose unknown to all but Fate.

The Pledge was made in the BC interior. And I don't mind giving out the plot because true tragedy cannot be spoiled by knowing the outcome. I'll tell you the ending of The Assassination of Richard Nixon too. The Sean Penn character is such a loser that he highjacks the plane while it's still on the ground and the first thing he does is kill both pilots. That's no way to bomb the White House.

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