The indisputable similarities between Samuel Bicke, the protagonist in Niels Mueller's debut feature \The Assassination of Richard Nixon,"" and the iconic Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's landmark ""Taxi Driver"" have stimulated a unique debate about the former film's purpose.
Many critics have assaulted Mueller's film as a regurgitation of Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader's classic study of urban alienation, and both Mueller and admirers of his film have responded by observing the fictional character of Bickle was partially inspired by the real-life Bicke and his aborted 1974 assassination attempt.
Whatever the case, ""Taxi Driver"" has an almost thirty-year head start on ""Assassination,"" and no matter how proficiently assembled Mueller's film may be, its overt repetition of Scorsese and Schrader's themes justifiably remains a sticking point.
Regardless of the correlation between the two, ""Assassination"" is a fascinating, worthwhile character study that boasts another marvelous leading performance from Sean Penn.
This unsettling, bleak drama begins with Sam Bicke (Penn) leaving his job at his family's tire store for a more promising occupation as a furniture salesman. It becomes immediately apparent that Sam is a loser; despite his earnest intentions, he is a rambling, whiny malcontent with the tendency to infuriate whomever he meets.
His separated cocktail-waitress wife (expertly underplayed by Penn's ""21 Grams"" co-star Naomi Watts) has grown tired of his rants and is unreceptive to his feeble attempts at reconciliation, as are his similarly wary children.
The loutish furniture store boss (a fantastic Jack Thompson) promptly becomes frustrated with his employee's ineptitude and unwillingness to ""stretch the truth"" to make a sale, and Sam's incessant blabbering seems to quietly irritate his lone friend Bonny (Don Cheadle).
After his life becomes increasingly worse, his tenuous shreds of optimism begin to fade as he places blame upon then-President Richard Nixon and eventually concocts a idiotic scheme to crash a plane into the White House.
The film offers a trenchant critique of Nixon through a central analogy that likens the crooked politician to ""the best salesman of all time""-a man who sold the country on a promise to end the war in Vietnam, did just the opposite and won the re-election on the very promise he did not keep.
Mueller isn't exactly subtle with his politics, but he effectively creates a riveting backdrop for Bicke's cascading madness to manifest itself in full.
In fact, ""The Assassination of Richard Nixon"" functions best as an uncompromising study of incompetence, with an utterly bravura performance by Penn.
Sean Penn is a performer who has proven to be the epitome of versatility; his varied work over the years, which includes roles in more than a few clunkers, has always been intriguing.
The Academy finally recognized his talent last year by awarding him a Best Actor Oscar for ""Mystic River,"" and he certainly avoided a sophomore slump with his participation in Mueller's thought-provoker. The man who once was the ""awesome, totally awesome"" stoner Spicoli in ""Fast Times at Ridgemont High"" has come full circle in playing Sam Bicke, who is one of the most compellingly pathetic film characters ever created.
Penn inhabits Bicke fully, and it is his fearless performance that propels this flawed film and ultimately lends it meaning and purpose. Though the film can at times seem like an overwhelming cavalcade of uncomfortable situations, Penn commands the audience's attention. A tragic, heartbreaking fusion of Willy Loman's hopelessness and Travis Bickle's lunacy, the character of Sam Bicke enters the pantheon of poignantly misguided cinematic misfits.
