July 27, 2006

Having traded braining the paparazzi for baiting President George W. Bush, these days Sean Penn is almost as famous for his activism as his acting. In this definitive portrait, John Lahr hears from his family, friends, fellow actors and directors, and charts Penn’s progress from Madonna to the mujahideen

In San Francisco one day last June, at 7:45am, an hour when even the pan handlers on Geary Street were still asleep, Sean Penn was standing in front of me. The day before, Penn had flown back from Tehran where, as a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, he had been covering the run up to the Iranian elections in order to attend the junior high school graduation of his 15-year-old daughter, Dylan.

Penn, who is 45 and a compact five feet eight inches, is at ease in his body. There is nothing hunched or furtive in his bearing –– he emanates what in earlier times would have been called ‘backbone’.

A veteran of some 35 films, Penn is renowned, in the acting profession for the meticulousness of his research. “Sean is a guy who doesn’t want to analyse a character too much,” Alejahdro Gonzalez Inarritu, who directed Penn in 21 Grams (2003), has said. “He wants to be as the character.” For his portrait of the stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) the role that made him famous at the age of 22 Penn lived out of his car at the beach; to play a cop, in Colours (1988), he apprenticed to an LAPD officer; for the role of Emmet Ray, ‘the world’s second greatest guitar player,’ in Sweet and Lowdown, he studied guitar fingering. In his forays into politics and journalism, Penn relies on the same strategy.

Because of his activism, Penn is often caricatured as a showboating celebrity liberal. “It’s as if Ernest Hemingway made sweet, sweet love to Jeff Spicoli before our very eyes,” the media blog Gawker said when the second instalment of the Iran piece came out.

Penn is an entrepreneur of his own edge –– a roiling combination of rage, buoyancy, tenderness and hurt. His struggle to contain this combustible emotional package makes him at once dangerous and exciting. In his art and in his life, he takes chances. (‘Sean is batty as a loon and is prone to taking extraordinary risks in foreign towns,’ the late Hunter S Thompson, who knew something about recklessness, wrote.) Penn has the confidence of a man who believes that the world will provide what he needs when he needs it. “It’s trusting your instincts and your experience,” he says. “Call it fate.”

Penn has had his share of run-ins with the police. In Macao in 1986, during the shooting of Shanghai Surprise, he was arrested for helping to deter an intruding paparazzo by hanging him by his ankles from his ninth floor balcony. (Penn subsequently broke out of the jail, where he was being held on charges of attempted murder, and escaped from the country by jetfoil.)

In 1987, he served 33 days of a 60-day sentence in the Los Angeles County jail (23 hours a day in solitary) for violating the probation he’d been given for punching a fan who tried to get too close to his first wife, Madonna. In 1988, Madonna herself summoned a Swat team to the couple’s house in Malibu after the two had fought.

“You have to protect your edges,” Dennis Hopper said, explaining why Penn keeps much of the world at arm’s length. “Sean goes deep into his emotional inner life. He allows you to see it, then he closes it back up. He has to, or he wouldn’t be able to survive.” Woody Allen agreed: “He’s not easily accessible. It’s hard to get through to him, and you feel that at any minute he could blow up at you. It makes it so interesting. Women want to take care of him and men find him heroic.”

Penn’s elusiveness was established at an early age. His mother, the actress Eileen Ryan Penn, told Richard Kelly that, as a child, “Sean had his own private little world going.” “I don’t think that I really spoke outside my home till I was five,” Penn told me. “I remember plenty of conversations, but they were all with myself. If I ever felt loneliness, it was in a group.”

Penn’s shyness, by his own admission, was also a kind of strategic retreat. “When I realised that people could not see into me –– that bothered me,” he said. “I wanted to be transparent, so as to be understood. I knew that my intentions were good. It seemed to me I could give a lot more and be more productive with people who could see who I was.” He went on, “I didn’t want to be charming.”

In high school, –– Penn learned that his unreachable quality could be used both to provoke and seduce. “Being shy brings attention –– it brings my subjects to me,” he explained. “It works the same way it did at high school.”

Almost all the characters to whom Penn has been drawn are to some degree cut off from the world, whether by murderous obsession (Samuel J. Bicke in The Assassination of Richard Nixon; Sergeant Tony Meserve in Casualties of War, Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking, Jimmy Markum in Mystic River), by mental or physical damage (Sam Dawson in I Am Sam; Eddie Quinn in She’s So Lovely; Paul Rivers in 21 Grams), by drugs (Eddie in Hurlyburly, Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), or by artistic self absorption (Emmet in Sweet and Lowdown).

But the fury that fuels Penn’s performances ‘the wonderful homicidal quality of his rage,’ as the screenwriter Nick Kazan describes it is examined in even greater depth in the three films that he has directed (he also wrote the first two): The Indian Runner (1991), The Crossing Guard (1995) and The Pledge (2001).

On the surface, Penn’s well told tales seem disparate. However, the issue at stake is almost always his own: the desire both to connect with and to elude people to be, in other words, a kind of respectable outlaw. Penn addressed this division most directly in The Indian Runner, which was inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘Highway Patrolman’.

Acting allowed Penn to turn his turmoil to advantage; it also allowed him to live up to his mother’s notion of his singularity. Penn was obsessed with the Watergate hearings, and dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but lacked the grades. By his senior year of school, he was cutting classes and carrying a Snoopy lunchbox full of film paraphernalia for Super 8 movies that he was making with Chris and friends like Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez.

After a brief stint at Santa Monica Junior College, where he studied car maintenance and cinematography, Penn was drawn back to the theatre. “Acting is the only field I could find where it was all about not having a precedent. It was one that depended singularly on what was different about you.” By then, Robert De Niro’s performances had captured his imagination.

“This wasn’t a guy who was born with fireworks in his pocket,” Penn said. “He didn’t have a conventionally handsome face. He didn’t have the melodic voice of Gregory Peck. He didn’t even have an interest in having those things. One knew how invested he was in what he did. It also struck a chord in me. I needed to do something 100 per cent. I hungered for a process that would leave no stone unturned.”

At the outset of his career, according to Chris, Penn ‘didn’t have a flamboyant or entertaining presence at all’, but he ‘worked as hard as an Olympic athlete’. “The thing Sean had was guts,” Eileen has said. “The talent came later.” From the age of 18 to 20, five hours a day, five days a week, Penn trained with method acting coach Peggy Feury, who counted among her clients Anjelica Huston, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum. “Feury was interested in how are you gonna bring yourself to the material rather than the material to you,” Penn said.

On his 19th birthday, Penn got his first professional part –– on the TV detective series Barnaby Jones. A year later, in 1980, he went east looking for work; almost immediately, he landed a part in a Broadway play. Two years later, he was cast in a cameo role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High; after the early rushes, his role was expanded into a star turn.

“Each time, Penn comes as a complete surprise,” Pauline Kael wrote in her review of 1983’s Bad Boys, in which Penn played a teenager in juvenile detention exacting revenge on another inmate. She explained, “He gets so far inside a role that he can make even a sociological confection such as this hero... someone an audience can care about.” Penn often approached characters from the outside in, which was a bone of contention with his mother.

In 1996, Penn and Wright, after six years together, followed by a fraught period of separation, were married (their children were five and two). The newfound maturity of his private life has been reflected in the range and depth of his screen performances as well.

Over the past decade, his restraint has become more elegant, his reservoir of feeling more profound. The breakdown of the death row killer Matthew Poncelet, in Dead Man Walking, and Jimmy’s grief crazed fury over the murder of his daughter, in Mystic River ––– for which Penn won an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 ––– are among the high-water marks of contemporary acting.

“Jet lag had cut me down around midnight the day of my return from Tehran. But my fractured body clock sounded its alarm at 4:30am the following morning. I got up, went to the kitchen, flipped on the TV and surfed my way through the channels, landing on CNN’s American Morning with Soledad O’Brien... She reported me to be currently in Tehran for the San Francisco Chronicle. Then, as footage of me from a well meant farewell given me by the Iranian Film Society played, she observed that I looked to be playing a journalist.

“So here we begin, as I sit in my kitchen in California, she’s reporting me to be in Tehran. She looks at the film given her by a producer and jumps on the bandwagon of attack... Let’s set the record straight, shall we?

“From the moment the international press became aware of my presence in Tehran, the predictable misreporting began deluging websites, newspapers, television and radio in the United States and around the world. The inaccuracies ranged from claiming me a pro-Iranian, anti-American lefty, to a continuous and lazy presumption that my first and highly criticised trip to Iraq had been supported by the San Francisco Chronicle...

“What’s disturbing here goes to the heart of the misunderstandings throughout the world and to the heart of freedom. And the free press is only free when it is bold and accurate. And while the dismissive and trivial attacks on me may be the bickering of details, the number of dead and the purpose of war are not.”

The next time I saw Penn, he was a hero. It was September, and he was on my television screen, wading chest deep in a New Orleans sump, trying to reach a survivor of Hurricane Katrina. Over the next 48 hours, I caught fleeting sight of Penn brandishing a rifle; lugging old people out of his boat; bailing out the boat; and, later, just off the plane to San Francisco, –– leaned up and remarkably composed, being interviewed by Larry King.

By then, although Penn had helped to rescue about 40 people, the press and the bloggers had done their sneering. ‘Sean Penn, International Man of Action,’ it was reported, had come to New Orleans with his ‘entourage’, including a photographer; the boat he was seen bailing out was widely reported to have sunk. None of this proved to be true.

When King pressed him about the story of the sunken boat, Penn responded with a bet. If the newspaper that had first reported the sinking –– Melbourne’s Herald Sun –– could produce any evidence of it, he’d pay out $1m; if it couldn’t, it should pay $1m towards disaster relief for the Katrina victims. The story went away but, as I discovered a few days later in San Francisco, Penn’s irritation did not.

In jeans and a black bomber jacket, Penn was sprawled barefoot on his office sofa when I arrived, around midday. Before we talked, he insisted that I read something he’d written for Rolling Stone. “Watching the scenes of devastation on my television set was like standing behind the tape line at a traffic accident and watching a child slowly bleed to death unattended,” it began. “I’m not gonna tell you I wasn’t very, very pissed off,” he said about the press coverage of his rescue mission.

“The whole reason I didn’t go sooner was that I worried I’d be in the way. I was not in the way. Listen, most of the rescues were done by civilians. It’s so disheartening that people are diabolically detached.”

As the hurricane was unfolding, Penn, who had spent some time in New Orleans, stayed in regular contact with political pundit James Carville, who is also one of the executive producers of All the King’s Men, part of which was shot in New Orleans. At first, Penn was assured that everything that could be done was being done; then the Superdome lost its roof, and it became clear that the city was imploding. Carville, at a certain point, said, “Do what you think,” Penn said. He also organised a small jet to fly to Baton Rouge with supplies.

As Penn told his story, he still seemed to be trying to make sense of the experience; words tumbled out of him in a sort of Cubist report of fractured time and vivid details: the prop plane he took from Houston to Baton Rouge; the police car that carried him into New Orleans; the darkness of the city; the empty streets; finding a boat; the adrenaline, the bewilderment.

A preacher called Willie, who knew of 40 children trapped in a school, became the navigator on Penn’s boat while he manned the bow, watching for submerged cars. It was a beautiful day; the water was black. Bloated bodies floated by, ‘all in the same position: face down, spreadeagled’.

Penn, who had been vaccinated for infectious diseases for an African safari earlier in the year, had no problem spending nine hours in the contaminated swamp. “I saw three non-civilian boats,” he said. “What was surreal was the lack of presence of official people the National Guard, the United States Army, the state, the New Orleans Police Department. There just weren’t nearly enough of them.”

At the end of the day on the water, Penn returned to the Garden District where he and friends had ferried the people they’d rescued. All of them were still waiting at the water’s edge. “Nobody was there for decontamination, nobody was there for medical relief, nobody was there to transfer these people out of there,” Penn said. He spent the rest of the night shuttling the rescued victims to a clinic.

Now that the situation in New Orleans was no longer about emergency response, Penn declared himself ‘a little depressed about it’. He said, “When it was about pulling people out of water, that’s a no brainer.” But, “Where do they go? How do you feed them? How do you get them to start their lives again? How do you figure out who’s the child molester? Now I’m as confused as the government about what to do. I struggle with the notion that my mind doesn’t go far enough. I’m always frustrated by intellectual restrictions. My frustration’s with my brain, not with my heart. My heart’s clear. I don’t have a problem there.”

In his interview with Larry King, Penn pulled his punches about President Bush and his late response to Katrina. Nonetheless, over the years he has consistently sought to get right up under Bush’s chin. For the Chronicle, Penn tried, and failed, to interview the president; in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

He famously paid $56,000 to publish an open letter to Bush on a nearly full page of in The Washington Post: “Many of your actions to date and those proposed seem to violate every defining principle of this country over which you preside: intolerance of debate... marginalisation of your critics, the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric, manipulation of a quick comfort media, and the position of your administration’s deconstruction of civil liberties all contradict the very core of the patriotism you claim,” he wrote. — Dawn /Observer Service

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