Sean Penn belongs to the same club of hellions as Rex Harrison. He may have flip-flopped a few times from lovable drunk to violent wife beater but this was the same actor who bit off his toenails in At Close Range. How can you predict the unpredictable? Did anyone think that Nicholas Cage would get himself into debt from buying dinosaur bones? And while we’re on the subject of controversial celebrities, why does Kevin Spacey lose his career while Sean Penn is still allowed to work? Is it because one abused minors while the other abused women? Shouldn’t everything evil be equally bad? Maybe Penn’s recent philanthropy has cleaned the slate for a good deal of people; but his charity has felt largely like penance for his mean streak, even though he just can’t seem to keep his trademark temper under control! Come on man, you were banging Charlize Theron! And she was not putting up with ANY of his shit. Can we say the same for Robin Wright? What about his State of Grace co-star Gary Oldman’s ex-wife? Can we say the same for all victims of abuse and trauma? What about Gary Oldman? When will I stop digging this hole for myself?
Like Spacey, Penn also has an eclectic body of work: not only as an actor, but director, too. If you ever felt like you were too happy and life was generally good to you then go watch The Pledge (what, you thought I was going to say Into the Wild?). But this is the niche that Sean The Actor has built for himself: his characters are often tortured with a dual morality. Carlito’s Way; Mystic River; The Gunman: if Penn isn’t playing an over-the-top villain then you can be sure his films follow the tried-and-true man-versus-himself story conflict. And like Gary Oldman, you expect a Sean Penn movie to have a scene-or-two where he flies off-the-handle and shouts his lines in his own imitable idiom (and then feel ripped off if the movie you’re watching DOESN’T have a trademark Freakout). There are thankfully many many Freakouts to enjoy from the entire cast, including his equally-tough co-stars Oldman and Ed Harris, with a guest turn from Burgess Meredith as a shut-in senior who just wants to eat his canned tomatoes in peace! These are all fantastic actors (and with Harris, director too!) and do their best with mundane material but make no mistake: they are tough old guys with their own process of getting into character. I can’t imagine what being a crew member on this was like.
Scorsese’s The Irishman may have made overlong mob docudramas mainstream again, but State of Grace came out around the same time as Goodfellas and you can tell that it apes what it wants from the tropes (tough guys in suits sitting in cafes and making threats over cannoli; a frankness toward mob proceduralism) and is content to coast on the goodwill and sobriety of its actors. Penn plays the most useless undercover cop ever, who infiltrates a childhood friend’s gang to take it down only to be sucked back in to the hole it left him in during his youth. Not only is his friend a belligerent drunk and prone to violence (with a young-and-incorruptible Robin Wright as his sister-slash-love-interest, with ass-length amber hair), but his older brother runs the gang and runs it his way; going so far as to kill his own associates and then lie about it to his crew so long as it gets him results. There isn’t anything here you haven’t heard or seen before, except maybe a JOHN-WOO STYLE SLOW-MOTION GUNFIGHT in LITERALLY the last five-minutes of the movie, where Penn leaps over a bar with shattering glass around him and manages to mow down four heavily-armed assailants with a pistol while not getting killed himself. Nothing else in the movie suggested that it was an action film, and every other hit (including a super-chill triple-murder by Oldman) leans to the Scorsese/Tarantino camp of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it violence. You know what, here it is. It doesn’t spoil the rest of the movie. It’s just gratuitous carnage. And why did it have to be the Irish mob? NONE OF THESE ACTORS ARE IRISH. The only correlation is that they all drink like skunks and the climax takes place during the St. Patrick’s Day parade. It’s well-paced for being over two-hours long but if I didn’t have it in my collection I probably never would have known it existed nor do I feel the need to watch it again. INTO THE BAG IT GOES (Jason’s Patented Laserdisc Purging on Facebook Marketplace Bag).
//jf 1.22.20
theory of a daskeman 