Sean Penn: The anti-movie star

Not much fun
As an actor, though, he’s beyond professional. In John Lahr’s New Yorker profile last April, Woody Allen says of Penn: “The feeling you get about him is that you can’t call his bluff, because he’s not bluffing.” Compare this sturdiness with the fragility of his Sam Bicke character in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon.” The panic in his eyes throughout the film. Bicke is a man trapped by circumstances and inarticulation and neediness, and by his sense that the world isn’t the way it should be. People lie and get ahead? That’s not right. It’s another seamless, unwinking performance that leaves you exhausted.

Are his performances too unwinking? Too self-contained? Watch “She’s So Lovely,” an awful title for a flawed film, in which Penn plays Eddie Quinn, another small-timer who — I think this is the point — goes crazy when his girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn) lies to him about the bruises on her face. He spends the next 10 years in a mental institution because of this lie. When he gets out, she’s married to Joey (John Travolta), a rich construction something-or-other with maybe mob ties. Travolta’s character is boldly drawn and external — the way Cagney was always external — and the movie becomes fun for a moment. We draw energy from Travolta. Then Penn’s character shows up again, all intricate and internalized and self-contained, and the fun disappears. We lean forward. We try to understand. In this way Penn draws energy from us. He exhausts us. He’s not much fun.

If movie stars can be said to seduce audiences, then in their performance there must be some infinitesimal awareness of the audience — of us, in the theater, watching — because you can’t seduce what you’re not aware of. But Penn’s performances are so self-contained, the audience doesn’t seem to exist for him at all. In the New Yorker profile, Lahr writes about Penn’s “guarded nature” and his “unreachable quality.” Are even his characters unreachable? “I’m the Indian runner,” the childhood game goes in Penn’s 1991 directorial debut. “I’m a message, and the message is ‘Bet you can’t find me.’” That’s Penn. His commitment to his craft is so complete, it’s as if he’s keeping us out.

This may be his greatest flaw; or it may make him the greatest actor in the history of movies.

Every man a king
Which brings us to “All the King’s Men.” What can I say? Penn stuns again. He stuns in another movie that doesn’t quite work. The backstory in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is extensive; and yet without that backstory, the front story of Willie Stark, Sean Penn’s populist governor who becomes corrupt fighting corporate interests, makes no sense. So we get the backstory in short and then longer bursts. Willie Stark, the center of the first half of the movie, disappears in the second half, and the movie suffers.

What’s fascinating about Willie Stark is that he’s big. He’s grand. He has large appetites. He is the biggest character Penn has ever played, and Penn inhabits that bigness like he was born to it. Penn is often compared to Brando and De Niro as the best actors of their respective generations; but unlike Brando and De Niro, Penn has yet to star in any of the best movies of his generation. Brando had “Streetcar” and “On the Waterfront” and “The Godfather,” and De Niro has “The Godfather Part II” and “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” It helps that both actors frequently collaborated with a great director: Elia Kazan for Brando; Martin Scorsese for De Niro.

Penn has had no such collaboration. The only director he’s worked with more than once is Brian De Palma, with whom he’s worked twice: “Casualties of War” and “Carlito’s Way.” But these were supporting roles, and neither movie is considered De Palma’s best, let alone the best of a generation. I know it’s asking a lot — like having the best baseball player play for the best team — but for Penn to star in one of the best movies of his generation, bigness is the way to go, and Willie Stark is a good first step.

Something happens, in fact, as you watch Penn as Stark, and it doesn’t happen often in a Sean Penn movie. You watch him stare down James Gandolfini over a bottle of orange pop. You watch him deliver an angry populist speech in a mangled Louisiana drawl. You watch bashfulness appear in his increasingly corrupt face as he looks over a scantily-clad skater. You watch it all and you think, “Hey, this is fun.”

Erik Lundegaard wonders why you still haven’t seen “The Thin Red Line.” He can be reached at: .

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