the same time Penn was taking his lead from another one of his outsider heroes Hunter S Thompson. He would pitch tip in ('annes or Northern Ireland on aimless gonzo-like trips: drinking. talking to the locals and exploring the cities. His was the attitude of the beat writers he loved: explore and then write the tales on the napkins of a million hotels and diners.
l’enn eventually entered the most well documented pan of his career. better known as the Madonna Years. John Schlesinger's 'I'he I'tl/t‘ott and the Snowman and James l‘oley's At ('lose Range gave him a certain bankable status until teaming tip in Shanghai Surprise with his then pop star wife retnoved him from it. For Penn it was a cursory lesson in chasing the long green. lirom that moment to this he has sought to pepper his choice of films with only the slightest spice of monetary ambition. and for that we should all be grateful. A series of powerful. gurning. duplicitous. seedy. mercurial. deeply tin-American turns followed. including Dennis Hoppers cops versus the mob thriller ('olours'; a
‘I THINK THAT
THE ALIENATION PEOPLE FEEL IS
A PARALLEL TO THAT WHICH BYCK FEELS'
two hander with Robert De Niro in We're No Angels; an altogether different New York mob llick State of (iraee (during which he met his current wife Robin Penn Wright) and Brian De Palma‘s prod at the criminal underworld (‘arlito's Way. He played a death row killer opposite Susan Sarandon‘s Oscar-winning mm in Dead Man Walking; took a comedy turn in Woody Allen's Sweet and [.mt'dott‘n: and most recently starred in Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River and Alejandro Gonzalez liiarritu’s 2/ Grams.
As politics informed his choice in films Penn began making the oddest of comparative choices. Take the period between 2001 and 2003. Having just made [Ant Sam. his own appalling entry into that appalling genre (‘Hollywood actors who play warm-hearted mentally ill people’). Penn paid for his sins with a bixan‘e. elongated cameo in Thomas l'esten Vinterberg's trippy. futuristic love story It 's All About Love. Later this month it happens again. when you can see Penn count the pennies in Sydney Pollack‘s silly UN-based thriller The Interpreter. A week before that he‘s in remarkable form in first timer Niels Mueller‘s excellent The A.s‘sassittation of Richard Nixon. It‘s based on the true story of Sam Byck. a disenfranchised and disturbed divorced salesman in suburban 70s America who finds in the music of Leonard Bernstein the impetus to express his frustration with Nixon's government by
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Sean Penn on the set of The Assassination of Richard Nixon with director Niels Mueller (top), looking through the camera (bottom), and as he appears in the end product (middle pictures and opposite)
hijacking a commercial plane and plunging it into the Whitehouse. limbroidered by the kind of slight but tough stylistic touches that make films such as lirancis liord (‘oppola's The ('onversation so compelling. it is clearly the kind of bravely uncommercial lilm this 44-year-old actor connects with to the core of his macho. hippy outlaw being.
Speaking effusively about the lilm at last year‘s (‘annes film festival. Penn joined the dots for those sweating hacks that he thought had missed the point. ‘Byck documented as feloniously a corrupt an administration as we reflect in our time. whatever is on screen I feel is very responsible. it is new. Being able to work on a movie like this. for me. the way I view movies. is a very hopeful sign about where movies are going.‘ After rambling on about his co-star Naomi Watts for ten minutes Penn allowed the messiah complex to take hold of him again: ‘(‘hanging in a radical way and killing people don't necessarily mean the same thing. I think that the alienation people feel is a parallel to that which Byck feels. You see it in entire cultures that feel alienated in one way or another - where people's voices are silenced.‘ Fond of repeating
Iii- [)octorow‘s quote that 'the responsibility of
the artist is to know the time he lives in’. Penn. in all his quixotic idealism. is probably more than we should expect from Hollywood in this day and age. The days that are left. that is.
The Assassination of Richard Nixon is on selected release from Fri 8 Apr. The Interpreter is on general release from Fri 15 Apr.
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