Much like the Joel Schumacher film of 1993 starring Michael Douglas, this film is about an ordinary man with an ordinary job who is driven to insanity by the injustice and unfairness of his world. While both films teach us that no matter how solid it seems, everything will crumble under enough pressure there is no humor to TAORN. In fact it's the most depressing film like...ever.
I don't know what made me go see TAORN. I'd heard nothing of it but I like Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (they were in the brilliant 21 Grams together) and everything else at the cinema I had either seen or looked crap (Man of the House, Miss Congenatailiality 2) so I chose this, hoping it to be a dark horse. It was well made and acted but it's really, really heavy and I would not recommend it to anyone bored with their jobs or lives in general.
Sean Penn plays the true story of Sam Bicke, a furniture salesman who is estranged from his family, his wife, his children, his colleagues...basically everything. He sees the fatcats around him growing richer and richer while he rots away in his inescapable reality of nothingness. He blames Dick Nixon for his woes, the fattest of all fatcats, the man at the top of the food chain. He believes that if he kills Nixon he might be able to make the slightest of changes to the racist, lying world.
Of course he failed, but watching Sam Bicke crash and burn is a very painful thing to do. What makes it more distressing is that there is never a reason given as to why everyone deserted him. It gave the impression that anyone can be so callous and uncaring and that anyone can be driven to such insanity and desperate measures.
Not a film to see with your girlfriend that's for damn sure but certainly an impressive, if tough to watch, piece of work.
