Losing Isn't Everything
by Chris Knipp

It's hard to understand the positive critical reaction to Niels Muller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon -- and the general approval of Sean Penn's overwrought, solemn performance -- till one remembers that using hijacked planes as weapons to destroy key American symbols is a hot topic, and that Penn's reputation as an actor is at an all-time high following his Oscar win last year.

Penn plays (and how!) Samuel Bicke, a man in an unnamed city who's estranged from his wife, exiled by his brother from a tire business, and, as the story begins, forced to be a salesman in an office furniture showroom. His glib, cynical boss (Jack Thompson) condescendingly offers Bicke Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale (this is the early 70s; they're both way out of date) and tells him Richard Nixon is the greatest salesman who ever lived. Nixon got elected by telling the country he'd get us out of Vietnam, the boss points out, failed to do it, and then got elected a second time making the same claim. What a salesman!

Bicke has a couple of big hang-ups. He thinks people ought to tell the truth and life ought to be fair. He also thinks his wife will take him back. The trouble is, he couldn't see the truth if it hit him over the head; and he's too busy whining (and, in Penn's clinker of a performance, stammering, sweating and wrinkling his brow) to see how life might be enjoyed. The main truth is that he's a stupid jerk. A fake-looking Adolphe Menjou moustache and cheap suits complete the picture.

The film has a voiceover of Bicke reading a letter to Leonard Bernstein that tells his whole story up to the moment of his final abortive exploit. Bicke is constantly bummed out. His harried wife, played by Naomi Watts (not at her best here) wears a short-skirted uniform waitressing at a restaurant to support the kids; all Bicke does is object to the dress and unctuously beg to be taken back. Every scene telegraphs in huge letters THIS GUY IS A CLUELESS LOSER -- which means he's not going to succeed at the sales job, the wife isn't going to take him back, he isn't going to get the loan for a kooky mobile tire repair service he's dreamed up with his long suffering black pal, Bonny (cheerily played by Don Cheadle), and when he tries to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House, he certainly isn't going to succeed at that.

However interesting this narrative (based on a true news event) is or isn't as a subject -- different treatment certainly might have made it interesting -- Penn's grimacing, drooling, whimpering pathos makes the movie painful and embarrassing to watch. Bicke is halfway between Travis Bickle and Willy Loman. He's little and flawed and self-deceiving like Loman, while, like Bickle, he blames his dysfunctions on the world and plots a megalomaniac revenge. Almost every other scene has a TV in it with Nixon nattering away. The office equipment store has a whole battery of them. What kind of office equipment is that? This intrusion shows how heavy-handed the movie's efforts to be relevant and political are.

Travis Bickle is a powerful character and Willy Loman is a tragic one. We're meant, perhaps, to sympathize with Samuel Bicke. We've all felt like this. There's a time in all our lives when others want us to do things we can't do, when we feel forced to give up what we care for, when we feel like losers. Only the thing is, Bicke really is a loser. He has no visible redeeming quality. His business scheme is so naïve and miscalculated that he seems retarded. He needs help. The question is what? Therapy? Institutionalization? Membership in a terrorist organization, maybe? In what some think is a funny scene he takes in a contribution to the Black Panthers and says he knows what they're going through and suggests they change their name to the Zebras to include whites.

Just as the movie telegraphs all its points, Penn telegraphs his. When he's meant to be imploding, it looks like he's going to explode and deconstruct. (For a subtle, much more convincing, example of onscreen implosion, watch Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman.) When Bicke's brother Julius appears toward the end reproaching him for allowing Bonny to get in trouble, we learn that Bicke is Jewish. That's news. At the end, Naomi Watts turns up as an airport employee, and things start to seem terribly wrong for the filmmakers as well as the character and the main actor.

This final terrorist episode has a kind of fresh strangeness. If the earlier parts had been made more matter of fact -- if Bicke had been played more straight by, say, a slightly dorky everyman like Adam Sandler -- it might have worked. Not, however, with Penn's obtrusive rug-chewing and the heavy-handed determinism of the screenplay. But even done better, you would still wonder why this story had to be told. It's an inexplicable footnote to the history of late twentieth-century American history, and it's neither instructive nor fun.

Years ago I crossed the country to visit a woman who was my correspondent for 45 years. She and her husband had then been "retired" (both in fact busy with professional work) for close to twenty years. "When you get older," Dorothy said, "you give up things." A simple message from a complex woman: and that's all I remember from the visit. As I get older it makes more and more sense.

You age, you pare down. This is a logical way to approach Clint Eastwood's simple, unoriginal, but somehow extraordinarily satisfying new movie, Million Dollar Baby, which stars himself, Morgan Freeman, and the talented youngster, Hillary Swank. Even determined detractors like Michael Atkinson admit, "saying it's an old man's movie is a serious compliment." Eastwood may take easy refuge in genre again here after going for a bit of a ramble in Mystic River, but his feet are on strong, solid ground. You leave the theater feeling you got what you paid for: no additives, no preservatives, no junk.

You get two beat-up old men and a desperate, hungry young woman who meet in a smelly boxing gym in downtown L.A. called the Hit Pit to enact the well-worn theme of the underdog who comes up through pluck and hard work to win fame and learn how ephemeral success and life itself can be.

Million Dollar Baby is based on a story by a seventy-year-old fight trainer in a book called Rope Burns, and it has an old man's appreciation of youth -- youth's hunger, energy, spirit; its ability to grow and endure physical challenge. The conservative Eastwood has a profoundly pessimistic philosophy, but in his elegiac view of things now past, there is poetry. His Frankie Dunn studies Gaelic, a language that speaks to the deepest roots of a man of the Irish persuasion. He reads Yeats, and the whole film has the melancholy of an Anglo-Saxon lament. We don't know much about Frankie except that he has an absent daughter who never answers his weekly letters, and that he's attended mass every day for 23 years, which his priest says is a sure sign he's full of guilt. Some of it comes from fights he mismanaged.

Eddie Dupris, or "Scrap" (Morgan Freeman), Frankie's longtime friend and cohort, who narrates in a craggy Shawshankian voice, is a classic beat-up fighter who went one fight too many and lost an eye but still haunts the gym -- in fact sleeps there on a cot in a tiny room hiding behind a rough curtain. Eddie and Frankie are foils. Eddie is generous and sweet, Frankie tough and guarded.

Enter Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), a hillbilly girl, over the hill for a beginning fighter because she's 31, who's grown up knowing only one thing, that "she's trash." In the well worn (but still serviceable) plotline, the hungry pupil must win the teacher's respect. Like the Karate Kid, she's got to struggle against her sensei's contempt. It takes Eddie's push to make Frankie take Maggie on. At first he stonewalls. "I'm tough," she pleads. "Girly," he quips, "tough ain't enough." He's also pushed toward her by losing a heavyweight contender he's been handling to another trainer with better connections and more of a drive toward the championship. And then the honing down and building up begin. Frankie makes Maggie into the best woman boxer in the world.

Minimalism isn't easy to accomplish, or describe. Cliché is easy to mock. Why the movie works so well when the training begins and the fights take place and the girl becomes a champion, and then hits a roadblock and the trainer makes his hardest decision, is hard to explain. Let me try, though. The two aging stars are famous, but they're really old, and because they're old, they don't muck up their performances with tricks. Eastwood looks strong and trim for 74, but he still has a lot of years in his face; ditto the younger Freeman. Hillary Swank, who is the exact age of her character, showed in Boys Don't Cry how hard she can work to prepare for a role and how well she succeeds when she does. She got an Oscar for it. That hunger, like her character's, pays off here. The fight sequences are good. For Swank training for the role meant training for a fight. She gives her lines what they need: sincerity, not spin.

This is an archetypal narrative -- and a well-worn milieu; but Eastwood believes in it. For him, it's inhabited by the kind of people you really can find in any boxing gym. Sure, the dialogue and voiceover telegraph their meanings bluntly. But it's all done with conviction and honesty. Eastwood hasn't tried to do anything fancy but he's stayed true to his tale. The result is one of the year's best American movies.


©2005 Chris Knipp
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