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Film

Indie flicks: Where the buck stops

By STEVE PERSALL
Published February 10, 2005

The Assassination of Richard Nixon (R) (95 min.) - The spirit of Taxi Driver echoes throughout Niels Mueller's character study of an outsider to American society whose only recourse is violence. Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle recorded his twisted thoughts in a journal; Assassination's Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn) mails his in letters to conductor Leonard Bernstein, railing against a system that deserted him and swearing to do something rash about it.

Bickle was a fictional sociopath. Bicke was frighteningly real.

In fact, filmmaker Martin Scorsese was inspired to create Taxi Driver by the true story of Sam Byck (Mueller changed the spelling to protect the privacy of his survivors). In 1972, with his entire life a shambles, Byck plotted to hijack an airliner and fly it into the White House to kill the man he held responsible for his problems: President Richard Nixon.

Penn delivers a powerful portrayal of a man destined to fail because of his own personality, yet always eager to place the blame elsewhere. Penn's methodical enactment of a slow, painful decline is the dark core of a downbeat movie, but it's one of his best, perhaps better overall than his Oscar-winning turn in Mystic River.

Penn's 21 Grams co-star Naomi Watts displays a wonderfully controlled bitterness as Sam's estranged wife. She doesn't want him around, and even the family dog doesn't seem to like him. Sam believes that if he could achieve financial success, everything at home would be fine. It wouldn't. The melancholy continues with Sam's chiseling boss (Jack Thompson) and best friend (Don Cheadle), a mechanic so desperate for his own piece of the American dream that he's depending on Sam. Bad choice.

Mueller writes lacerating inner monologues for Sam while Penn projects a mealy-mouthed exterior. The film doesn't take sides often in Sam's dementia, although a scene featuring Thompson explaining how Nixon's Vietnam policy was the best sales con ever is superbly slanted. At times, the movie resonates in today's world politics, sometimes uneasily, as when Sam practices for his assassination attempt by pushing a paper airplane into a cardboard cut-out of the White House. The final sequence is tense, violent and too close to Sept. 11 events for comfort.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon is too deliberately paced at times, repetitive at others, and reminiscent of Taxi Driver almost to a fault. But for terrific acting and occasionally chilling suspense, it's a solid choice. Grade: B-plus

Uncle Nino (PG) (100 min.) - For 55 weeks in a Grand Rapids, Mich., theater, audiences longing for movies with moral backbone and messages of family values fell in love with Robert Shallcross' film. Uncle Nino is about as squeaky-clean as anyone can expect to see these days. It's the kind of movie that film critics are predisposed to dislike, a homogenized collection of nice that would make Disney executives shake their heads at its quaintness.

But you know what? A lot of it works. There's something almost revolutionary about a film willing to place at its center a septuagenarian Italian tourist who speaks pidgin English, plays the violin for chirping birds, loves planting flowers and cultivates a relationship with his rebellious (but not too rebellious) great-nephew, even collaborating in a high school battle of the bands. A blandly dysfunctional family is healed by Nino's warm touch, and all turns out right with the world.

What the heck is Shallcross - who worked for the St. Petersburg Times in the 1980s - thinking?

Apparently he's thinking of the crowd that made a smash out of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, launched at the same Grand Rapids theater. This is a movie made the way they used to be. We'll see if people put their money where their morals are.

Nino (Pierrino Mascarino) travels from his picturesque village to the United States, visiting his late brother's son, Robert Micelli (Joe Mantegna). Robert is a workaholic with little time for his wife (Anne Archer), who wants a real husband, son Bobby (Trevor Morgan), who wants to play rock - but not too rock - guitar, and daughter Gina (Gina Mantegna), who wants a puppy. We can smell the amore coming from a mile away and, more often than not, the aroma is sweet.

It's a kick watching juvenile delinquents whose worst offenses are toilet-papering trees and (gasp!) smoking cigarettes. Shallcross cozies up to another branch of the morality police with several antismoking remarks; even the worst smoker quits after gazing into Uncle Nino's wizened eyes. No problems are too deep, no resolutions too shallow. Comfort filmmaking.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. For the right crowd, Uncle Nino will be a pleasurable experience. Grade: B-

Bad Education (NC-17) (109 min.) - The last, lingering image in Pedro Almodovar's film is the screen filled with the word "passion." Appropriate, because the Spanish filmmaker has filled the screen for nearly two hours with several definitions of the word.

There's the passion between two Catholic schoolboys in the 1970s, a friendship escalating to homosexual experimentation. Then Almodovar essays the passion of a priest discovering their secret and reacting with jealousy because he's in love with one of the boys. There are the twin passions of lust and revenge when the two boys meet again as men, compounded when the now-former priest enters the picture again.

Finally, there is Almodovar's own passion for cinema, stretching the art form while paying tribute to its past, specifically the film-noir era informing each shot of Bad Education. He's an unlikely candidate for a monochromatic genre, because his films are typically saturated in garish hues. But Almodovar, even in color, is keenly aware of film noir's amorality, its conniving spirit and its pitch-black humor. He also fashions a film-within-a-film motif, as if one scenario isn't enough to contain all this passion.

Bad Education isn't on the level of Almodovar's most recent, Academy Award-winning works, Talk to Her and Things About My Mother. But it's a fascinating near-miss. The movie's energy seldom rises to the level of strangeness that Almodovar practically trademarked. Yet this comparatively subdued approach to shocking material may be exactly what's needed for moviegoers who don't understand why so many critics consider Almodovar a genius.

The film begins with Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal, The Motorcycle Diaries) visiting Enrique (Fele Martinez), a film director who seems like a version of Almodovar's younger self in the same 1970s period. The men were classmates and, it's hinted at first, much more. Ignacio has a story, based on their boarding school relationship, and wants Enrique to turn it into a movie. Then Almodovar does it for him.

The screen shrinks, and we're watching Ignacio (who prefers to be called Angel) portraying the "femme fatale" of the piece, a transvestite nightclub performer and hustler named Zahara whose latest mark turns out to be his childhood lover. Zahara also has a story on paper, practically the same as Ignacio and Enrique's, and plans to blackmail the priest or else publish it.

From there, the less you know about Almodovar's serpentine path of deceptions, flashbacks and multiple identities, the better. I'm not sure that I could spell them out correctly, anyway, as convoluted as they become. People still aren't certain exactly what happens in the film-noir classic The Big Sleep, either. Almodovar makes that his license to confuse, but not without a mesmerizing style.

Once again, Bernal positions himself as the next evolution of Johnny Depp, an actor willing to take on any role and make it zing. Bernal has at least three characters here - Zahara is the most flamboyant and easily noticed - and plays them beautifully. Martinez is primarily the dupe in the film-noir formula, but makes an impression. As the priest, Daniel Gimenez Cacho is more pathetic than monstrous.

The NC-17 rating is because of one explicit sex scene among adults and a suggestion of adolescent groping. Although the molester-priest angle is, as they used to say, ripped from the headlines, Almodovar isn't here to shriek about blasphemy or betraying trust. It's simply a provocative means of propelling a story. There are no answers, nor accusations, and Bad Education is a better film for that. Grade: B-plus

[Last modified February 9, 2005, 13:23:08]