The assassination of Richard Nixon
Given that Richard Nixon, to the best of my knowledge, was not assassinated - I expected to watch a film that perhaps dealt with the social issues of the era, perhaps touching on the 'assassination' of Nixon during the Watergate scandal... alas, there's nothing quite so interesting or challenging.
Instead, we're dragged through a couple of months in the life of a rather sad man (Penn) who clearly has some significant mental health problems. The film introduces us to the major social players of the time, namely; Nixon, The Black Panthers, the 'pre-yuppie' businessmen, etc, but never really does anything with it. They're token gestures, merely put there to explain Penn's oddity and frustration with the nation he comes to dislike. Ultimately, Penn's character comes to regard Nixon as the figurehead or embodiment of everything he hates about his life and the unfair world around him, and eventually resolves to assassinate him as an act of psychotic despair.
I left the film completely unsatisfied, having felt nothing but apathy and distaste for Penn's character. In this, I'm really quite unsure of whether this is a masterstroke of acting on Penn's behalf, or whether it's simply a case of a poor script. Why? Because every character in the film comes to regard Penn in the same way - as someone who is pathetic and beyond even caring about.
Personally, I found the film is quite boring, devoid of any ability to engross the viewer and incapable of eliciting any empathy. Maybe the one-dimensional character was intentional... but something tells me it wasn't.
Give it a miss.
(one star out of five)