Although less visceral than “Taxi Driver”, this film’s obvious inspiration, “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is a small, haunting masterpiece in its own right. ‘Nixon’ eschews lurid thrills for bleached realism, and its mechanisms are more subtle. While Travis Bickle was the demonic mirror of urban decay, Sam (Bicke, in tribute to his cinematic cousin) is never more than a cipher. Sean Penn, without resorting to showy acting, depicts a twice-crippled Hamlet: not only can he not carry out his revenge, he cannot even rise to the challenge of dramatizing his own inertia. His indecision is often comic, as when he knocks over a trash can in a rage and then picks it up, or when his fiery “take this job and shove it” speech is birthed after several milquetoast attempts. Sam’s hairtrigger paranoia and manic solipsism channel no one so much as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. The story’s lacunae make it hard to categorize, creating a deeply unsettling experience.

Although the film’s milieu is clearly meant to suggest our own Bushwhacked era, the film offers no vision of a way out of this country’s moral, spiritual, and political morass. Problems are raised but not solutions; anxieties but not certainties. The film exposes the basic flaw of the contemporary moral climate not by calling out Washington for its crimes, or chastising the people for their wickedness, but merely by exploring the irony of the moral rectitude which causes so much injurious confusion. As Sam says, “Certainty is the disease of kings, and I’m no king”.

Indeed, “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” doesn’t pit good against evil in an easy dramatic package. It assumes the moral compromises we have all made and follows the consequences to an ending that is no less appropriate for its mesmerizing bloodiness. As Julius asks Sam, the question isn’t one of right versus wrong—none of us is innocent—but rather how much shame we can live with. Bicke’s fate drops the question squarely in our lap.