Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
But that's not all. Chris also sings the blues in "The Funeral," like a crazy person, and it's kind of great -- uninhibited, like a drunk and miserable Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Then he becomes the devil incarnate when confronted with a teenage prostitute. I mean, he really becomes the devil incarnate. "You want 10 dollars? I'm gonna give you 20 dollars. You know why? Because you sold your soul! Don't fuck with the devil!!"
He screams, in a kind of disembodied, high, almost Joe Pesci-voice, as he rapes the crying young girl. The beast has possessed him, and it's truly a horrible scene, because only someone who knows how terrifying and hopelessly miserable it is to be insane could have done this scene as well and as gravely as he did it. You can tell he didn't phone it in, by how well he plays the emotional aftermath in later scenes; terrible self-loathing, the starving need for kindness and mercy and understanding that he doesn't feel he deserves.
Why didn't Chris Penn get jettisoned to stardom by that performance? Was he too fat? Too scary? Benicio del Toro got noticed for that movie, and you can't understand a single goddamned word he says. He swallowed his lines like they were made of bacon, and yet he's a big fat slob winning Oscars. Why? Too many Penns already on the podium? It's a mystery, because that performance, while it will not make you feel all warm and snuggly inside, is one of the best acting jobs of the 20th century, and I'm throwing laurels at it, if nobody else is.
It all goes downhill from "The Funeral." Chris got fatter, the roles got dumber. He plays -- guess what? -- a cop, in "Trail of a Serial Killer"(1997), a movie that should have been relegated down to the holding cells below NYU's Tisch School for the Arts as a kind of cinematic "Red Asphalt" object lesson in bad filmmaking. Then there's "Deceiver" (1997), a lie-detector drama in which Chris Penn plays the "dumb" cop who gets "deceived" by chronic Brit over-actor Tim Roth, the "smart" criminal. The script sounds like it was written by the guy who writes copy for SkyMall catalogs after reading too much Jim Thompson: "I'm rich," sneers Roth. "Loaded. Filthy with it!"
"Temporal lobe epileptics may stand on furniture, try to undress, or seem frightened," exposits a court psychiatrist ... cut to Tim Roth, playing a temporal-lobe epileptic, standing on furniture, trying to undress, seeming frightened, in that order.
There's lots of puerile, Hitchcockian back-up-while-zooming-in nausea-cam work -- oooh, noir-y. Chris spends the film giving Roth lots of squinty-eyed looks of bulldog concern and bewildered haplessness. It's a snore.
In "Boy's Club" (1997), you can tell that Chris Penn has moved from grief into acceptance of the fact that the scripts he is getting are increasingly second-class. He looks like he weighs about 300 pounds, and he's beginning to eke out lines in which he can pull stunts, little super-subtle comedy moments with which he can at least amuse himself and a couple of his crew pals while watching the dailies -- like Lenny Bruce, late in his career, Chris Penn looks as though he is playing to the band.
He's a psycho in the film (or is it a psycho cop? cop turned psycho-cop killer?) He has a badge, and a gunshot wound, and he's hiding out in the forest clubhouse of a bunch of 13-year-old boys. He's a prick, drinking Jack Daniels, being casually cruel and perverse, blaming his victims for the nasty things he does to them. Chris Penn is the best staring, fat evil toad since Paul Sorvino, and his performance would be pretty funny if the film weren't so heavy-handed and jejune.
It gets worse. He costarred with the sub-electrifying Steven Baldwin in "One Tough Cop" (1998). He's so big, he can barely run, and it's just embarrassing to have an actor of his caliber playing supporting donkey boy to a black leather loveseat like Steve Baldwin who, with stocking cap and carefully manicured three-day beard, is trying his best to foment a star turn by trying to act like a macho hardass by trying to act like Alec Baldwin. The dialogue is kind of priceless in that it's so phenomenally bad, it sounds like Dan Brown of "The Da Vinci Code" tried real hard to write something gritty for Scorsese:
"You're not gonna believe dis. Besides raping the poor woman? They beat in her head with a statue of the Madonna. They carved crucifixes all over her body. I counted 40 of 'em. Then, they pissed on her. What kind of a animal would do dis?"
"What we probably got is a coupla pipe heads wacked out of their minds on rock." Ooooh. Streety!
I believe the bizarre and enjoyable film "Cement" (1999) marked a breakthrough into a new kind of character for Chris Penn; he plays a bad cop, OK, but one who likes to encase people who piss him off in cement, and slowly; he ties the guy up, standing, and lets his feet dry, he talks to him, he tells weird stories. He pours more concrete up to the victim's hips. He is dementedly oblivious to his own cruelty. Chris has mastered a great way of looking off into middle distance while he's executing a horrible task, with an expression that says, This is my fucked-up fate. Oh well, as if he had no control over the atrocities he commits. That's an amusing sociopath. It seems like, after his slurry of mediocre stink bombs, Chris found a solid kind of sarcastic, weird levity to tap into in this role, which is really fun to watch.
Comedy seems to be the direction Chris Penn is going -- he could be our generation's heavy-looking heavy with wicked comic timing, like the late, great J.T. Walsh.
In "Corky Romano" (2001) he essentially plays the exact same mobster with the exact same pathos he would have in any other gangster drama -- his character could have walked right out of Abel Ferrara's mook nightmare -- only this time the character is a latent homosexual. Ah, the rich texture and dimension -- you can practically smell the Drakkar Noir wafting right off the screen.
And in "Starsky & Hutch" (2004), he plays a hilarious, taunting asshole cop.
I think I see a pattern emerging. Jump back!
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