A gripping story of an abandoned man driven mad.
Sean Penn plays Sam Bicke, "a grain of sand", in a true story of a thwarted assassination attempt on Richard Nixon. Sam is separated from his wife, struggling in his job and nobody listens to him as he grows increasingly desperate and paranoid. We don't find out why his wife has left him, which I think is a major flaw in the film, but we know she doesn't want to take him back. He works as a furniture salesman but doesn't want to lie to people. His frustration is misguided towards the "system" and he tries to join the Black Panthers in an attempt to "do something". He tries to get a loan to set up a tyre business (copying his brother) with his friend but this is denied because his friend is black. He loses his job and decides to kill the president to show "that the least grain if sand has in him the power to destroy". The film is punctuated with snippets from tapes that he makes to send to Leonard Bernstein to explain his actions. It's a good story but you can't help feeling the outcome would have been different if someone had taken the time to really listen to him and realise he wasn't quite sane. A good perfomance and a compelling story.
Posted by hurtling17 at April 22, 2005 08:27 PM