 Sean Penn as Sam Bicke in The Assassination of Richard Nixon |
Pop quiz: search your memory for a moment and see if the name Sam Bicke rings a bell. Coming up empty? Don't feel bad, most people have forgotten that he ever lived. But if Sam's dreams had come true he might be as well known today as Lee Harvey Oswald, because Sam's final wish was to fly a hijacked airliner into the White House, taking President Richard Nixon with it.
Byck was the real-life inspiration for Samuel Bicke, played with a sad, desperate intensity by Sean Penn in Niels Mueller's unsettling debut feature, The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Bicke is as ordinary as they come, an office supply salesman, the kind of anonymous worker we meet every day. He also happens to be a deeply principled idealist fixated on honesty and integrity, a man who finds it beyond his comprehension that the world doesn't work the way it should, and who doesn't understand how his inflexibility to adapt to a provisional morality has not only lost him a string of jobs, but also irreparably damaged relationships with his brother, wife, and children.
Sam is separated from his wife Marie, a cocktail waitress masterfully acted by Naomi Watts with a weather-beaten, pragmatic toughness, a woman who stood by her man as he steered them through one too many perfect storms of self-righteous indignation and is ready to pilot her own ship for a change. The fear of losing Marie is eroding Sam's sense of self like a perpetual acid rain, and the fact that he can't get his door-to-door tire repair service with his friend and business partner Bonny (beautifully played as doleful and jaded by Don Cheadle) off the ground only feeds his rage against what he sees as a world of opportunistic hypocrites, presided over by a president who is the worst one of them all. When Sam begins to become convinced that a loan application may be turned down because Bonny is black, he becomes dangerously untethered.
Marie and Bonny operate with a bottom-line mentality that Sam's rigid standards can't accommodate. What he sees as sticking to his guns is really a deep-seated insecurity, a fear of being found impotent in society, and as we've learned all too well in the last few years, there's nothing more dangerous than someone with nothing left to lose. Sam's final act is a last-ditch attempt to finally make a difference by committing an act that no one can ignore, but it's a horribly misguided and Quixotic bid at immortality. Sam may be a failure at life, but in death he can live forever.
Though gut-wrenching at times, Nixon is not a tightly plotted suspense thriller; we know from the outset what Sam is going to attempt, which leaves director Mueller to concentrate on a nuanced and patiently observed character study of a principled man in a crisis of conscience in a world that doesn't seem to care.
Countless articles were written about Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, so readers now know much about the apparent motives behind their terror attacks. What's discussed in far less detail, however, is how neatly those attacks provided a pretext for the Bush Administration to carry out pre-existing plans for pre-emptive war in the Middle East.
 A still from Hijacking Catastrophe |
The shadow of arrogant empire-building hangs like a gray afternoon over Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp's sober and alarming documentary Hijacking Freedom. Narrated by Julian Bond and featuring interviews with dozens of experts including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tariq Ali, and Mark Crispin Miller, Hijacking makes a reasoned and fact-supported case that the Bush Administration cynically used the 9/11 attacks as a subterfuge to enact the precepts of the ultraconservative "Wolfowitz Doctrine," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's plan for global domination through unilateral force.
Hijacking argues that as foreign policy the plan is a disaster, squandering global goodwill and making the US an even more likely terrorist target in the future. Even more troubling, the filmmakers demonstrate how the Bush Administration deliberately misrepresented their case for invading Iraq by manipulating intelligence and exploiting the fears of the American people after 9/11.
Like much of the recent spate of political documentaries that have sprouted up in the last year, the filmmaking is rudimentary and unadorned, but Hijacking makes a powerful argument that the Bush Administration's policies have less to do with justice and morality than sheer egomania in pursuit of a legacy of arrogance and force that will hang over generations to come.
 Image courtesy of www.moogmusic.com |
Robert Moog is a man who had immortality thrust upon him. Or as the inventor of the modern synthesizer puts it himself in Moog, Hans Fjellestad's new biographical documentary: "I got into the electronic music business like slipping backwards on a banana peel." It's a modest and characteristically self-effacing statement from someone whose inventions contributed as much to the vocabulary of modern music as the electric guitar shaped the course of rock & roll.
The instrument that bears Moog's name was once treated with scorn, derided as "inhuman," and often shunned by musicians who feared—sometimes rightly so—that the device would be misused by commercial recording studios looking to replace those pesky humans altogether. But four decades after its introduction Moog's sounds have entered the popular consciousness, and the man-made bleeps & burbles that once connoted futuristic other-worldliness now seem organic, vibrating with a human warmth.
Moog is prone to statements like: "I can feel what's going on inside a piece of electronic equipment. I have a sense that I know what's going on inside the transistors," so it's perhaps surprising that he's also an organic gardener. But his worldview is shaped as much by spirituality and philosophy as an engineering degree, and it's charmingly apt that a man who has spent a lifetime on better living through circuitry sees himself not as an icon to be revered, but rather as a sort of conduit to a universal musical consciousness that chose Moog to express itself through his creations.
Moog reveals its subject's instruments to be earthy and almost quaintly low-tech-look-ing in the era of the burnished titanium lap-top; wires protrude from phalanxes of patch bays in a tangled spaghetti that resembles less a vision of tomorrow than a 1950s telephone switchboard suffering a nervous breakdown. Seeing Moog's inventions in performance clips played by the likes of Stereolab and Money Mark lends their sounds a tangible quality that is both cerebral and hands-on—or delicately hands-off, in the case of Moog's transistor-driver version of the Theremin, which is played via tiny incremental hand movements in the air around the instrument.
With a running time of 70 minutes, Moog is somewhat breezy in places, and a little too much time is spent with Moog and former associates merely reminiscing about history when one would rather see it in action; we yearn for more of the archival footage glimpsed in tantalizing excerpts elsewhere in the film. But in the end Moog works best as an affectionate tribute to a man whose name will go down in history whether he ever intended it to or not, in the process making a case for immortality having much more to do with divine humility than the hubris of blind ambition.