The Assassination Of Richard Nixon

Niels Mueller's dour directing debut uses a little-known footnote to America's epic history of political assassination — the 1974 attempt by Samuel Byck (renamed Bicke) to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the White House — as a prism through which to examine the slow strangling of one man's American dream. Who knows where Philadelphia salesman Bicke's (Sean Penn) slipping-down life began? But by 1973 his social awkwardness and rigid inability to enter into the one-hand-washes-the-other banter of business transactions have lost him countless jobs, friendships and, most devastatingly, his relationship with estranged wife Marie (Naomi Watts) and their thre...