The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Released 2004
Stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson, Brad Henke
Directed by Niels Mueller

Baltimore, 1974. Sam Bicke explains and explains and explains. He has it all worked out, why he is right and the world is wrong, and he has a fierce obsession with injustice. "My name is Sam Bicke," he says at the beginning of one of the tapes he mails to Leonard Bernstein, "and I consider myself a grain of sand." He sells office supplies, very badly. His marriage is at an end. The bank is not acting on his loan application. Nixon is still in the White House. The Black Panthers are being persecuted. It is all part of the same rage coiling within him.

Sean Penn plays Bicke as a man who has always been socially inept and now, as his life comes apart, descends into madness. His own frustration and the evils in the world are all the same, all somehow someone else's fault, and in the opening scene of "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," we see him in an airport parking garage, concealing a pistol in a leg brace. He mails one last tape to Leonard Bernstein. He plans to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House.

There was a real Sam Bicke (spelled Byck), whose plan of course failed. Niels Mueller's movie is based on his botched assassination scheme, but many of the other details, including some scenes of mordant humor, are the invention of Mueller and his co-writer, Kevin Kennedy. This is a character study of a marginal man who goes off the rails, and Penn is brilliant at evoking how daily life itself is filled, for Bicke, with countless challenges to his rigid sense of right and wrong.

Summary by Roger Ebert

I know this movie used the real life Sam Byck as an inspiration for its story, but I think it would have been better if it had stayed closer to the true story. For example, the real Byck spent time in a mental institution, so people were aware of his mental illness. The movie would have been stronger with that acknowledgment, because it seemed no one understood he was going insane. They did, and he was treated. Obviously, he wasn't helped enough. The movie suffers from his slow descent into madness, because it's so gradual no one reacts to it. The end, on the other hand, is apparently quite accurate in the details, and is pretty shocking. Because the movie shows Bicke as being so inept, I didn't think his final act would be bloody. I thought he would probably be caught before he got on the plane or overpowered in the flight, so I was shocked by the violence. The good news is Sam Byck didn't succeed in his crazy assassination plot, but the bad news is he succeeded in being remembered. --Bill Alward, July 31, 2005