by Joe Donnelly
Would I do him? Well, a good rule is to avoid sex with anyone—no matter how hot—that you wouldn’t want to have a conversation with, and as I learned, Bale is someone you do want to have a conversation with. Or as Mr. Herzog says, “You see very handsome actors and they don’t have depth. He has so much depth behind what you see on the surface.”
“Sean Penn, With His Own Two Eyes”
A version of this story was originally published
in the LA Weekly, September 19, 2007.
Author’s note: For awhile there, it seemed like Sean Penn was everywhere—kayaking to the rescue in New Orleans, railing publically, unapologetically, and sometimes hilariously against the Bush administration, and releasing Into the Wild, a beautiful film he adapted, directed, and coproduced. I admired Penn’s righteous dissent and his willingness to take action in service of it. On a September afternoon when we both seemed to need a timeout from our lives, we cruised around in his battered Range Rover, smoked cigarettes, shot pool, and discussed what it means to be an American in opposition.
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?
—The Clash, “Clampdown”
The drive from Oakland to Mill Valley sends you across the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge. It’s worth the four-dollar toll for its breathtaking views of Mount Tamalpais, the sentinel of Marin County, and the gilded burgs over which it watches. Near the end of the bridge is another landmark: San Quentin State Prison, a place that teases the hard cases locked in there with a panorama of Mt. Tam that, from the prison yard, feels so close you’d think you could reach out and touch it. I don’t know if that’s irony or cruelty, but I do know prisons sure are given prime real estate in these parts. One of Sean Penn’s best friends is stuck there in San Quentin, maybe for good, and Penn cites this unfortunate fact as one of his main reasons for choosing to live in this corner of Marin County. He simply wanted to be closer to his friend.
I don’t think Penn cared much about being closer to the Acqua Hotel in Mill Valley, where we are to meet, a place that looks like it was dreamed up by a set designer for the James Bond franchise. Even with its backside views of a San Francisco Bay inlet and its sun-splashed interior, the Acqua feels sterile, its elegance—all clean surfaces, unmolested bright walls, lots of light, and sharp lines—contrived. It’s tragically hip, and it seems like an odd place to be meeting Sean Penn. It’s more like a place one of his characters would inhabit, like the bright and soulless loft Jack Nicholson’s bereft Freddy Gale retreats to for booze and bad sex in The Crossing Guard.
When Sammy Hagar, the man who achieved the impossible by killing Van Halen, pulls up in a black Maserati and emerges wearing extra-long shorts, bad footwear, and a T-shirt promoting some bunk product or event, and is urgently greeted by a severe blond publicist type straight out of central casting, the whole thing starts to feel absurd. I poke my cigarette into the air, thinking some dimension will surely burst. It doesn’t.
Actually, it does. About fifteen minutes later, when…well, picture if you will a sleepless and forlorn journalist chain smoking in front of the all-glass doors of the David Lynchian Acqua Hotel. A plume of smoke fills the foreground just as a beater of a Land Rover rambles into the parking lot a little too fast and all but crashes into a tight parking space. As the smoke dissipates, Sean Penn tumbles out of the Land Rover in worn work boots, jeans, and a gray T-shirt. He approaches with the athletic grace of a cat, all body parts in motion at once. He’s muscular like a construction worker. His hair is wild and magnificent, and there are deep crags around his cowboy eyes. The first words out of his mouth are:
“Can I bum one of your cigarettes? I’m sorry, I left mine back at the house.”
“No problem,” you say, and then, for no good reason, or because you have no impulse control: “I’m getting divorced.”
“Shit,” he says, exhaling and looking you in the eye. “I’m sorry about that. That’s a bear.”
Sammy Hagar should watch that entrance in slow motion, repeatedly.
I’m up here interviewing Penn because a film he wrote and directed is imminent. But instead of settling into a hotel couch for the standard grilling, we finish our cigarettes, and Penn suggests we take quick leave of the Acqua. He spent the previous day—beginning at 5:00 a.m. and ending at 6:00 p.m.—rafting the North Fork of the American River and is still hungry and a bit worn out. We head for a local sushi joint in a civilized Marin County commercial center that would be a strip mall anyplace else. On the way there, Penn drives in a manner I’d describe as intent but not overly aggressive. I study the ink on his arms, which I had noticed immediately upon greeting. It’s authentic old-school work, almost of the prison variety, and a refreshing contrast to the rote tribal decorations that have become de rigueur for frat boys and young Hollywood alike. (Is there a difference?)
Penn’s new movie, Into the Wild, based on the Jon Krakauer book of the same name, tracks the journey of a young man away from the conventions of his birthright and into a deep, deep wilderness that is both literal and ontological. It’s an epic and ultimately fatal quest, one that Penn has rendered onto screen in ways that feel more relatable and intimate than Krakauer’s account, which, as a mostly journalistic undertaking, couldn’t help but keep its protagonist at a short arm’s length. I read the book and saw the film, but it was the film that made me feel like I got to know Chris McCandless. It’s touching and heartbreaking and infinitely more accessible than Penn’s previous efforts as the writer and director of such dark and troubling ruminations as The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard and as director of The Pledge.
Penn began pursing Into the Wild almost immediately after the book came out in 1996. Securing the rights was no easy task; a family and all the legacy they have left of their son were at stake. After reading the book, Penn found out a lot of Hollywood folks were trying to nail it down. He got in touch with Krakauer’s agent, who got him in touch with the McCandless family—father Walt, mother Billie, and Chris’s sister, Corine.
“Jon flew to Virginia, and I flew to Virginia, and we all met there,” Penn says. “After two meetings they had mutually decided on me. I was going to do a third kind of close-the-deal session, and I was leaving [for the airport] at five in the morning, and I went to the shower. I got a call and Robin [Wright Penn, his wife] got me out of the shower, and it was Billie, the mother. She had a dream that Chris did not want the movie made. ‘Do not get on the plane.’”
“So, I didn’t. And I remember repeating this, because it was the truth—I said to her that if I didn’t believe in dreams, I would not make movies. So I left it at that.”
Penn stayed in touch with the family over the years. When he was in New Orleans last year filming All the King’s Men, he got a call from the family’s representative asking if he was still interested in making the film.
“That was a decade later,” Penn says.
This film, and the book before it, contains a subplot to the narrative of Chris McCandless’ journey—one of family secrets and dysfunctions, many of which fueled the young man’s uncompromising and, in the end, lethal ideology or idealism (you decide). That families have secrets and dysfunctions a young man or woman might struggle to come to terms with is no revelation. What is a revelation, though, is the courage the McCandless family shows in turning its dark underside toward the light so that we may learn whatever we will from Chris’s tale. That exposure is particularly raw and unabashed in the film.
“It is tougher in the movie,” Penn agrees. “It is something, you know—they struggled with it. I know. But I felt, it is my speculation, that there is a degree of penance involved in their decision, and I think it is a brave and selfless decision. But they struggle with it still. They go in and out, and I just got very good news that they are coming to the LA premiere, which really makes me happy. I’m just grateful to them for seeing it through…revisiting it in suc
h a loud and public way.”
This film means a lot to Penn. Not just because he wants to repay the trust given him by the McCandless family and by Jon Krakauer, which he does, but also because, well into a career as one of the most, if not the most respected actor of his generation—though one who can’t guarantee box office—and after directing three well-regarded movies that never quite transcended cult status, Penn would like to know somebody’s out there.
“I really want a lot of people to see it,” he tells me. “I want it to mean something to people. I am going to feel that I have exercised my last piece of language in finding out if I am completely alone in this world or not if it is not responded to. So I’ve got some investment on that level.”
Penn tells me this near the end of our time together, a time during which we will smoke a pack of cigarettes, shoot pool, and talk about everything from the role of language in civil society, to the importance of rites of passage, to what it means to be a citizen. Look, I know what you’re thinking, because everyone is immediately thinking something about Sean Penn. But I want to tell you: I think you’ll be surprised.
◆◆◆
I’m going to be honest with you about where I’m going with this: I like this guy already. A lot. He had me before we even met, when last spring he made a speech in which he called Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice “villainously and criminally obscene people, obscene human beings, incompetent to fulfill your own self-serving agenda, while tragically neglectful and destructive of ours and our country’s.”
Actually, he had me way before that (but I really like that one), back when the initial Iraq war drums were beating and anyone with an ounce of intelligence and insight could predict the looming disaster that has since unfolded beyond our worst imaginations. Penn was one of the first Hollywood voices to speak out. On October 19, 2002, he published an open letter to President Bush in The Washington Post lamenting his “simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil.” And he called out the lapdog media that has been complicit in this calamity: “Take a close look at your most vehement media supporter. See the fear in their eyes as their loud voices of support ring out with that historically disastrous undercurrent of rage and panic masked as ‘straight, tough talk.’”
Penn’s opposition to this regime has been uncensored and unrelentingly memorable ever since, whether it’s fishing old people out of flooded New Orleans—something for which he earned wide criticism as a PR hound, despite the insistence of New Orleans historian and author Douglas Brinkley that his efforts were genuine and responsible for saving forty or so people—or writing (quite well) about his experiences in Iraq and Iran, visiting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, or posting his frequent tirades against this administration’s chronic criminality. For me, his protests exist somewhere between metaphor and metaphysics. And I’m all for it. But it seems to make a lot of people uncomfortable, as if metaphors actually exist that are too strong for declaiming the calamities of the Bush era.
One of Penn’s more priceless moments came during a speech he delivered at a town meeting held last March by Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents much of the East Bay. Addressing the president, Penn said, “We cower as you point your fingers telling us to support our troops. You and the smarmy pundits in your pocket—those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and blood-soaked underwear—can take that noise and shove it.”
Forget whether you agree with him or not (and how couldn’t you?), how about a little appreciation for the sheer poetry of it? That speech, and those lines in particular, earned him a rare moment of comic relief on The Colbert Report, during which he and Stephen Colbert engaged in a Meta-Free-Phor-All judged by former poet laureate Robert Pinksy. Penn won the contest ten thousand points to one by working the soiled-and-blood-soaked imagery into every metaphor, whether the category was world leaders or love. (“Love is a fragile flower opening to the first warmth of spring whose crimson petals are not as red as George Bush’s soiled and blood-soaked underwear.”)
The bit was hilarious and has become an Internet favorite. But the line was actually a late addition to his speech. “I was on the freeway, kind of going over the speech in my head, and I just started thinking about those guys, and I got angrier and angrier. I pulled over on the side of the road and that was the last thing I added to it.”
The Penn of The Colbert Report, the self-deprecating one, seems genuine. As I see him today, he appears to be a far cry from Jimmy Markum, the vengeful father he won an Oscar for playing in Mystic River, or the popular caricature of a thuggish celeb out to bash any hapless paparazzo who gets in his way. He’s engaging, thoughtful, and, despite a physical presence that suggests a coiled cobra, gentle. We take a table in the back of the restaurant and order a modest amount of sushi and talk while chewing. The staff here seems to know him, and he treats everyone courteously.
In a way, The Colbert Report send-up was perfect because the show operates as a parody of the phony journalism we’re fed from so many sources, including major networks. Penn himself is a sharp amateur journalist. He has traveled to Iraq twice since the war began and wrote about both experiences for the San Francisco Chronicle. His second account, from a January 2004 visit, contains this caveat about the challenges he faced selling the trip to his family: “My reputation within our own home is one of impulsiveness, hubris, and an overall bloated sense of my own survival instincts. Of course, this is entirely unfounded, but we’ll leave that for another day.”
The reports are well-observed and non-polemical, rich in detail. One observation proved particularly astute: “It is a compelling experience to have been in Baghdad just one year ago, where not a single Iraqi expressed to me opinions outside the Baathist party lines, and just one year later, when so many express their opinions and so many opinions compete for attention. Where the debate is similar to that in the United States is over the way in which the business of war will administer the opportunity for peace and freedom, and the reasonable expectation of Iraqi self-rule.”
While reading his accounts, it occurred to me that Penn has an abiding respect for the practice of journalism.
“Yes, you know, if there is going to be a turn,” he tells me, “it is going to come out of that.”
I ask if he’s disappointed in the level of journalism that’s been practiced over the past several years.
“I’m disappointed in actors who become models and journalists who become contest-show hosts,” he says. “I feel what disappoints me the most is somebody who can do something well and does not do it. The people kind of letting the culture lead them instead of leading the culture. I mean, freedom of speech exists in North Korea—if you trust your wife. But where it counts is with journalists… I mean, it’s not the domain of journalists, is the problem. It’s the domain of all of us, but where I worry about it the most is in journalism.”
Penn, of course, received a ration of shit for his much-publicized recent visit to Venezuela as Hugo Chavez’s guest. He won’t talk about it now because he’s writing a piece on it, except to say “it was a fascinating trip” and that things there, including the press clampdown, aren’t quite what we’re led to believe. Why, many have asked, would Penn play guest to Hugo Chavez and risk being seen as naïf? I believe the answer is that he is not a proponent of received knowledge. Take Chris McCandless’s sojourn, for example. Even though it was well-documented in the Krakauer book, Penn took it upon himself in researching his screenplay to retrace much of McCandless’s path. He spent time in the Anza-Borrego Desert, visited seminal characters in McCandless’s life, and even made a somewhat harrowing trip to the Alaskan wilds, where he crossed, with Krakauer, the river that penned McCandless in when he’d finally had enough and wanted to return to civilization—a river that, as much as anything, played a fatal role in the young man’s story. The through line, though, whether it be post-deluge New Orleans or post-invasion Iraq, is that Penn is going to see for hims
elf.
He makes this clear to me when I suggest that his public tirades, and such indelible images as him rowing a boat through the streets of New Orleans, plucking people from the flood, are a form of political theater.
“I’m not that smart,” he says. “I have noticed some things have happened that are working that way, or firing that way. But no, I’m a guy who watches a little television, gets pissed off, and decides I am pissed off because I don’t know enough about it to make a good argument. But my gut knows they are full of shit, and then I go out and force myself to learn by getting in the middle of it.”
When did Penn the actor become Penn the political animal? It would be easy to blame George Bush, if blame is what you’d like to do. But Penn cautions against such an easy read. He tells me he’d been politically active for a while before the Bush presidency but felt it better to maintain some separation between politics and art. That changed when he had kids.
“I grew up in a politically engaged family. My father [actor and director Leo Penn] was blacklisted, and he was a very strong, patriotic guy nonetheless,” he says. “I felt that in lieu of the silence of what was going on in my field at that time, particularly related to the Iraq war that was about to happen, that I was not going to go to bed proud just on the faith of what good work I do politically anymore, because I did not think we had time for that. And I am still not sure we have time.”
There is, of course, silence, and then there’s what Penn does. His public denouncements are saturated with a rage that frightens some, while others witness these performances and think, Fuck yeah, I’ll take another dish of that. But there is something more than urgency feeding his swing-for-the-fences activism—something internal.
“I think you got to go with where your voice comes from,” Penn tells me as softly as the breeze is coming off the Bay on this post-card day. He exhales a large plume of smoke (we’ve moved outside by now so we can take minutes off our lives unfettered) and adds, “I have largely been fueled on anger. There is no question about it.”