Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Forget his embarrassing, scenery-chewing performance in "I am Sam" -- Sean Penn is one of the two greatest actors of his generation.
Mar 23, 2002 | In nominating and awarding the Oscars for best actor and actress, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn't always fall for the showiest, most mannered performances. Just most of the time.
Sean Penn was nominated in 1995 for his role as death-row killer Matthew Poncelet in "Dead Man Walking," a characteristically understated, and astonishing, performance. Now he's nominated again for his role as a mentally retarded man who fights for custody of his young daughter in "I Am Sam." Forced, stuntlike and repetitiously punctuated with elfin grimaces and sunshine-innocent beaming, it may very well be his worst performance.
The occasion of one bad performance may seem like a strange time to celebrate an actor's career. But then, there's some truth to the adage that you often don't know how much you love something until you have, at least temporarily, lost it. Penn's contemporaries (people like Tim Robbins, who directed him in "Dead Man Walking") and his elders (the actors he looked up to in his youth and who later became his friends, among them Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson) have cited him as the finest actor of his generation. Although I'd have a hard time deciding between Penn and Robert Downey Jr., I'd still say they're pretty close to right.
But Penn has continually threatened to quit acting, and although he always comes back, you can't blame him for being as disillusioned as he is -- not with acting itself, necessarily, but with the nasty business of acting. "It's a bad time for acting," Penn said in a 1998 interview with the New York Times Magazine, just as he was completing Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown." Movies break down into the expressive and the impressive. And the impressive has pretty well taken over the box office. The thing film actors of my generation are most afraid of is being found out to be a fraud. Even the ones that aren't frauds think they are. That's why so many people succumb to a mass embrace. It makes them feel protected against the anxiety that they may not have anything to share. Some of them do have something to share, but they've given it up."
Of course, no one expects Penn to go away overnight as an actor: His distrust with Hollywood games is as much a part of him as the dimple in his chin, and it's most likely the thing that's guided him straight all these years. But he works so infrequently these days that seeing him in a bad role only makes you long to see him at his best.
Penn's best is different for every moviegoer. It isn't so much that Penn is different in every role. It's the different kinds of different that he comes up with -- the subtle variations on even a stock character that he pulls from his own mysterious depths. His characters are rarely static; two roles in particular are miracles of transformation. As Sgt. Tony Meserve in "Casualties of War" (1989) and as coked-up mob lawyer Davey Kleinfeld in "Carlito's Way" (1993), both directed by Brian De Palma, Penn runs off with us before he has even fully won us over. Watching his face at the end of each movie, we can't be sure if he's the same person we met at the beginning. The more we think about it, the more we realize he's not, and yet there we are with him anyway. In his best performances, he takes us as willing hostages.
The great secret of Penn's skill may be that he's not an easy actor to like. His face doesn't win us over immediately, the way, say, Matt Dillon's or Jim Carrey's or Jeff Bridges' does. At the beginning of each new performance, he seems like a stranger, someone we have to get to know even though he seems vaguely (or overtly) determined to keep us out. His eyes can be small, hard, dark and unforgiving, which is what makes their radiant openness, when we catch it, so affecting. His mouth is anything but sensual and expressive: It's a hyphen of a mouth that catches you by surprise when it stretches into a wide, pumpkin-carved smile.
He falls into the category that a character in the recent romantic comedy "Kissing Jessica Stein" refers to as "sexy-ugly." The sexy-ugly guy is one who works on you in spite of yourself, who shows up unbidden in your erotic dreams not because you want him there but simply because he's asserting his right to be there. In Penn's case, that's often true from scene to scene, even if we're not talking about performances that are particularly erotic.
In "Dead Man Walking," his Matthew Poncelet is such a closed-off and unyielding character that it's almost difficult to look at him in his earliest scenes, with his arrogant pompadour and BB-size eyes. Penn's Poncelet wins us over only by making us unable to look away. He never rounds off the hard edges of this character, not even in Poncelet's last-ditch moment of redemption. His performance consists of a repeated and minute chipping away at those edges, the flakes flying off them like bright, tiny sparks. No wonder we can't take our eyes off him.
