1.85:1 DVD capture: The Assassination of Richard Nixon The DVD

Buy the ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON poster at Moviegoods (click on image) The Assassination of Richard Nixon arrives on DVD in a suitably gritty 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The image sports rich blacks and crisp detail--maybe too crisp: the light ringing around the opening titles and other fine objects betrays at least a modicum of edge-enhancement. (Good for the grain, not so good for all that loud seventies attire.) Audio, in Dolby Digital 5.1, is more tasteful and restrained than one might expect in this era of the wall-of-paranoia mix (see: Arlington Road, Requiem for a Dream), but that's not something to hold against the track itself, which sounds full and clear. The TH!NKFilm release is being distributed by New Line in the U.S. and MGM in Canada, and though the former supplements its platter with welcome trailers for Primer and Vera Drake and the latter with a pair of French listening options, the two discs are otherwise identical twins.-Bill Chambers

The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here

Produced by Alexander Payne and Leonardo DiCaprio, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (whose relationship in 21 Grams gives the film a really weird vibe), Niels Mueller's hyphenate debut The Assassination of Richard Nixon fictionalizes and somehow even more baldly politicizes the life and sad end of one Travis Bickle, I mean Travis Bicke--I mean Samuel Bicke (Penn). (It's telling that whatever its star power, the key moment of the film belongs to gravel-voiced Michael Wincott.) A failing office furniture salesman with a simpering personality and a misguided sense of justice and honour, Samuel is told by his fatuous boss (Jack Thompson) admiringly that Richard M. Nixon is the best salesman in the world for twice selling his country on a lie, thus Samuel begins to identify Nixon with all that is evil and maestro Leonard Bernstein (never seen, though his Beethoven performances form the bulk of the soundtrack) as the embodiment of all that is true. Nixon spoken of in this way reminds a lot of R. Lee Ermey's speech to the recruits in Full Metal Jacket in which Lee Harvey Oswald is remembered as a good Marine for squeezing off three shots at a moving target in a short period of time. The misfortune of its timing is that The Assassination of Richard Nixon has been rendered a not particularly subtle text by the 2004 election.

But it is another conversation late in this election year about a country divided along moral and economic lines, with one side convincing the blue-collar constituency to vote against their financial well-being by banking on (and laying the groundwork for) the eternal dictum that the more desperate a person's life becomes, the more likely they are to turn to belief in a supernatural reward offered by the sweet kiss of death. Samuel says at a point just prior to trying to hijack a commercial airplane to crash into the White House that "certainty is the sickness of kings"--which does two things the Democratic party failed to do in their umpteenth attempt to get a stick of Massachusetts wood into the Oval Office: it clarifies the incompetence of Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice when she exclaimed that no one could have imagined using a jetliner as a weapon (except for this Bicke guy, Tom Clancy, the Columbine shooters, the Japanese air force in WWII, "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City"--oh, and Al Qaeda), and it appeals directly to the core Democratic constituency's hunger for an obvious, simplistic, didactic howl about why the blue states think our leadership is blinded by their certainty.

The problem with that, however, is that Samuel Bicke becomes a martyr for leftist chagrin in The Assassination of Richard Nixon--a slightly more murderous Forrest Gump who tries to convince the Black Panthers to call themselves the "Zebras" and accept white members, applies for a doomed SBA loan for a mobile tire business with his black friend (Don Cheadle, the black friend du jour), and convinces himself two years into a trial separation that he might win back his wife (Watts) with lies of selling ugly 1970s office furniture. (Though Travis Bickle became a martyr, too, he did so with an elephant's portion of media-tinged irony.) Making a hero of this milquetoast schlep with social anxiety disorder and some innocent blood on his hands is a dangerous proposition whether intended or just situational. Having Sean Penn looking a lot like Robert De Niro and acting a lot like Dustin Hoffman just reminds that we're a long way from the soul-searching paranoia of the cinema of the seventies--and a lot closer to the idea of film as auto-devouring sequences of signs and signifieds. It's impossible to watch The Assassination of Richard Nixon without understanding the politics of the filmmakers and the films from which they took their cues. Whether those faults are primarily the fault of an audience too savvy for the American New Wave or of an instinct (Penn's? Mueller's?) towards importance too openly catered to is a tough question to answer.-Walter Chaw

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