Genre: drama

Director: Niels Mueller

Producer: Alfonso Cuarón and Jorge Vergara

Writer: Niels Mueller and Kevin Kennedy

Cast: Sean Penn, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson, Naomi Watts, Brad William Henke, Michael Wincott and Mykelti Williamson

Music by: Steven M. Stern

Duration: approximately 5,555 seconds

Wikipedia: wiki about the movie

On Feb. 22, 1974, Samuel Byck, a onetime tire salesman and failing family man, entered the ranks of pseudo-celebrity by trying to commandeer a commercial airliner and crash it into the White House. He didn't get far, which is why the man who would be Booth is a footnote to history rather than a chapter and is best known as one of the title characters in the Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins." Of course, the target of Byck's psychotic rage, Richard M. Nixon, had already launched his own attack on the White House, and within six months of the bungled assault, the 37th president of the United States resigned from office.

Earlier this year, three decades after Byck's flameout, the provocatively titled film "The Assassination of Richard Nixon" had its premiere at the Cannes festival. Directed by a first-timer, the Wisconsin-born Niels Mueller, and written with Kevin Kennedy, it stars Sean Penn as a character "inspired by" the man who hoped to "drop a 747 on the White House and incinerate Dick Nixon." (The inspired probably explains why Byck is spelled Bicke here.) One of only a handful of entries from the United States in the festival's official lineup, Mr. Mueller's feature was also one of the few fiction features from this country with a claim to seriousness beyond the strictly remunerative. The rest of the titles - films like "Troy," "Shrek 2," "Kill Bill Vol. 2" - were principally on tap to bring American razzamatazz to the French red carpet.

I bring up Cannes for two reasons, the first being that I haven't a clue why Mr. Mueller decided to turn his attentions on this particular story, though I imagine that a film about a crazy American one ostensibly driven even more nuts by his president held a certain attraction for European festival programmers. Our crazies fascinate the world (or perhaps reassure it), even when, like Byck, they are motivated neither by religion or ideology, just illness.

Byck protested outside the White House dressed as Santa Claus and made tape-recordings of his rants, sending copies to the likes of Jonas Salk and his idol, Leonard Bernstein. He called his assassination plot "Operation Pandora's Box," bequeathing the doomed plan a metaphoric richness it probably didn't merit.

The strange details of Byck's case, interesting in and of themselves, don't add up to much in "The Assassination of Richard Nixon." And here's the other reason I bring up Cannes: the film reaffirms that the greatest problem facing American cinema isn't that its movies are in thrall to violence or in the grip of the accountants. The problem is that not enough American filmmakers have anything they need to say.

Few are engaged in larger conversations about the movies and the world; most don't even seem aware that such conversations exist, which may explain why their films lack urgency. Unlike the directors of "The Passion of the Christ" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" and those who make their mark at Cannes these filmmakers aren't on a mission.

Because there's no discernible point to "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," no sense of larger purpose, the film has only craft and technique to recommend it. It has both, certainly. Mr. Penn, as is his wont, acts up a storm with the aid of some facial embellishment, in this case a mustache that broadcasts the fanfare for the common man with all the discretion of Aaron Copland. The mustache, along with Byck's cheap suits, sullen children, estranged wife (Naomi Watts) and clammy sincerity, mark him for tragedy. But Mr. Mueller wrings neither tragedy nor meaning from his character. Byck is just lonely, depressed and fixated on his wife, on the bureaucrat he hopes will grant him a business loan and, finally, on Nixon, a gargoyle hovering on every television in view.

In other words, Mr. Mueller's Byck is a collection of symptoms without a diagnosis. That "The Assassination of Richard Nixon" is as well directed, acted and shot as it is makes Mr. Mueller's inability to invest his film with significance all the more disappointing. A project like this one, filled with promise and propped up by talent like Mr. Penn, Ms. Watts and Don Cheadle, who has a small part as Byck's only friend, brings with it the expectation that we will get something to chew on after the final credits roll. Here, that expectation is all the greater because in both visual style and anxious mood Mr. Mueller owes a considerable debt to Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," the finest movie ever made about the American habit of attaining celebrity through murder...

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