Sean Penn: The anti-movie star

Near the end of Terrence Malick’s World War II film, “The Thin Red Line,” which comes as close to poetry as movies can get, there’s a scene in which First Sergeant Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) listens to Sergeant Storm (John C. Reilly) wearily expound on his feelings — or lack of them — after battle. “When I look at that boy dying,” Storm says, “I don’t feel nothing. I don’t care about nothing anymore.”

Welsh’s response (“Sounds like bliss”), and his later response to the see-everything light of James Caviezel’s Private Witt (“You’re a magician to me”), sets him up as the film’s everyman. He’s the guy stuck between two ways of dealing with the horrors of the world: feeling nothing (Storm) or feeling everything (Witt). He’s envious of those who can feel nothing, but, by the end, he also grudgingly admires Witt, who can feel everything. Welsh is stuck in this awkward middle. Like most of us.

It’s a great scene in a great movie, but what truly astounded me was Penn’s brief reaction shot to Storm’s declaration. Myriad emotions — anger, admiration, envy — flitted across his face in a flash. I thought, “How does he do that?” I thought, “That’s not acting; that’s being.” I’d long been an admirer of Sean Penn but I decided right then to write about him.

Big mistake.

Most pathetic
The problem with watching Sean Penn is that generally you have to watch him in Sean Penn movies. “The Thin Red Line” is a glorious exception. Most Penn movies are less story-driven than character-driven, and the characters are invariably unpleasant. They’re not even grandly unpleasant in the manner of a Jack Nicholson character. They’re small men with small lives.

In “Bad Boys,” Penn plays a small-time punk responsible for involuntary manslaughter whose girlfriend gets raped by his enemy. In “At Close Range” he plays a small-time punk whose girlfriend is raped and murdered by his father. In “Casualties of War” he plays a tough sergeant in Vietnam responsible for the gang rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl. In “Dead Man Walking” he plays a con on death row responsible for the gang rape and murder of a young couple.

And these are the good movies — movies that at least make an attempt at structure and resolution and possible redemption. It doesn’t take into account all of the flat movies he’s made: “Shanghai Surprise” and “We’re No Angels” and “She’s So Lovely” and “Hurlyburly” and “The Weight of Water”: Movies where the elements don’t add up to what they should.

You could have a great debate about which Penn character is the most pathetic. There’s Daulton Lee, the spoiled California drug dealer/traitor in “The Falcon and the Snowman,” who thinks he’s smarter than the KGB, and whines and lies to his family, “I was working for the CIA!”; David Kleinfeld, the scumbag lawyer in “Carlito’s Way,” who tries to frame one client and murders another; Emmet Ray, the second-best guitar player in the world in “Sweet & Lowdown,” who doesn’t need to brag pathetically but does, and who only realizes retroactively that he’s thrown away the best thing in his life; and Samuel J. Bicke, the failed salesman of “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” who’s too uncomfortable in his own skin to hold onto a wife, a job, a friend, a brother, and, ultimately, a life.

Penn’s pathetic characters generally have thin, reedy voices, pencil-thin moustaches, heroin/coke habits and a self-delusion that lasts through the end of the movie and, one suspects, into eternity. Rupert Pupkin has nothing on these guys. Travis Bickle is a smashing success in comparison. No one does pathetic like Penn.

My vote for his most pathetic, though, would go to Eddie, the marginal, misogynistic Hollywood player in David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” who continually loses mind-games with Kevin Spacey’s Mickey, and who comes up with the most pathetic way of asking a woman for oral sex in the history of the world — bouncing up and down on his balcony and whining, whining, whining. The scene should be funny. Just describing it is funny. But there’s something so committed in Penn’s performance, so self-contained and unwinking, that you can only turn away in disgust at how utterly small and obtuse a human being can be.

It’s a great irony that for all the angst of these characters, Penn’s most famous character is still Jeff Spicoli, the “Hey bud, let’s party” stoner/surfer dude from the broad comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” It was one of his first roles. He’s been a bit darker since.

The anti-movie star
What do we know about Sean Penn? He travels well: To Iraq in December 2002 and ’03; to Iran in June 2005; to a Hurricane Katrina-decimated New Orleans in September 2005.

His movies travel well, too. “The Interpreter” made 54 percent of its total box office in foreign rentals; “I Am Sam”: 59 percent; “21 Grams”: 73 percent; “The Assassination of Richard Nixon”: 80 percent.

In many ways he is the anti-movie star, but in no way more than this: Most movie stars play admirable or heroic characters in the movies while their off-screen lives are often less than admirable. Penn plays less-than-admirable in the movies while his off-screen life is often admirable. Maybe even heroic.

Some may disagree, but I admire his attempt to find out more about Iraq before we invaded it; would that the Bush administration had done the same. I admire his rescue mission in New Orleans; would that FEMA had been so quick. I admire him for sticking up for fellow actor Jude Law during the Oscars two years ago, and for telling “Team America” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker to stick it. I admire his mix of caring and toughness and f-you attitude. I admire his taste in women. Hell, I admire him for punching out the paparazzi in the 1980s — a feat for which he got no end of grief. If someone messes with you, mess back.

Dude smokes like a chimney. That’s not so admirable. Even as I write this there are reports he broke an anti-smoking ban in Ontario by lighting up during a press conference. He smoked on “Inside the Actors Studio,” too. Almost all of his characters smoke — at a time when few characters in movies smoke (it helps that he plays no one you want to emulate). The smoking stinks of a kind of prolonged adolescent rebellion that goes with his taste in literature: the Beats and Bukowski. He’s written articles about his travels for The San Francisco Chronicle, but he’s obviously an amateur there.

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