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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The first time we all got a good look at Sean Penn's younger brother was in the high school football drama "All The Right Moves" (1983), which I was going to joke was originally titled "All The Wrong Movies," but in fairness (and I'm not taking any shit about this), it is surprisingly good, for a greasy kid sports drama -- a kind of dire, tooth-clenchy, beer-swilly "Deer Hunter"-like portrait of poverty-line, steel-town Polish Americans for the Clearasil becreamed.
The early '80s was an odd time for female beauty, as evidenced by the positing of Lea Thompson in a pair of doubleknit marching-band pants as the hot female lead. I've never really understood the Lea Thompson mystique -- girls with heart-shaped heads and eyes that far apart always look like they suffered from fetal-alcohol syndrome to me. But she's pretty good, at least in this one, and in what would now be considered an impossibly European love scene, her body-double goes to both second and third base with Tom Cruise's finger doubles, and she actually shows full-frontal in one scene that also involves Tom's buttocks. There is also an actual split-second of schlong, but God knows whose it is.
In their dead-end town, Tom and Chris Penn play stressed-out Catholic jocks trying to earn college football scholarships to avoid forfeiting their lives to the local steel mill (where their dads and dads' dads all worked from sunup to sundown and had horrible industrial accidents unto death, etc.). They play in the trenches of a dead-broke, nothing-but-the-extra-oil-on-our-foreheads team of homely, meat-necked guys in the full travesty of adolescence, chanting, fighting, foaming at the mouth and in their pants with desperate, culty team zeal. Chris is Tom Cruise's dunced-out and acne-spackled jock pal and key subplot -- he's the star of the team; a hormonal slob with great gridiron talent who, somewhere around plot point 1, gets word that he's received a full ride at USC despite his 2.0 GPA (so you know something terrible is going to happen to him). There is a particularly awkward and gratuitous locker room scene, which I suppose was intended to show interracial solidarity between the equally impoverished Polish and African-American kids, wherein the funky Negroes teach the unfunky white boys how to dance. I guess African-Americans have been teaching us rhythmless, left-hooved honkies how to dance on film since Mr. Bojangles tapped Shirley Temple up a staircase, and I guess it is no more racist than one of those Aunt Jemima cookie jars or salt-shaker sets, but it still makes me want to puke fatback into a top hat.
There is a great little moment where Chris really captures the unbearable pressure of being a small-town football hero, with all the older, burnt-out steel mill yahoos living vicariously through his youth, speed and unsquandered potential; he is on a bus, going to a big game, and there are tears in his eyes as he mumbles over his rosary beads, shitting bricks over the entire townful of stress hysterics he carries in his duffle bag. Somewhere around plot point 2, Chris gets his white-trash Catholic girlfriend knocked up and has to turn down his USC scholarship and get married. Tom Cruise's character goes to "congratulate" him at the sorry, low-budget shotgun wedding. Chris pulls off a very complicated emotional maneuver: He meets Cruise's eyes, as Cruise is giving him that sad, "Life sucks, doesn't it brother?" sympathy power stare.
"Hey," says Chris, with heartbreaking good humor, his eyes wide and insistent. "Hey! Look at me. Man, I'm gonna have a kid. That's more important than any college. I got what I want. OK? I got what I want."
It's a great little moment, because the character is not only trying to convince Tom Cruise of this sentiment -- he's also trying to convince himself that he's already convinced of this sentiment. The audience knows that the character is in total denial. Even at that tender age, Chris Penn knew how to make that sophisticated emotional choice: Someone whose life is going down the pipes would be forced, out of survival instinct, to believe it was what they actually wanted.
