In the midst of the row that has engulfed Sean Penn over his comments on “ludicrous and archaic” British colonialism regarding the Falkland Islands, the words put into Penn’s mouth by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their animated film Team America, inevitably have resurfaced, laden with a certain resonance.
“Last year I went to Iraq,” Parker and Stone had Penn declaiming in their satirical assault on the self-regard and simplistic views of Hollywood A-list activists. “Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place. They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate.”
In the fall-out from his remarks made in Argentina, when visiting President Kirchner, there has been something of the tone of Parker/Stone in the attacks on him as the usual suspects have stuck the boot in.
“Vainglorious and ill-informed,” the Daily Mail huffed. For its part, the Daily Telegraph chose to quote that colossus of reality television, Ben Fogle, a man not usually noted for his acuity as a foreign policy commentator, who said that Penn should be fed to the “crocodiles”. (Whether Fogle believes there are crocodiles in the South Atlantic remains a mystery.)
Dissenting views
The brickbats aimed at him in some quarters of the British press are likely only to confirm his suspicion, which he has voiced before, that much of the media too often work to stifle alternative viewpoints rather than amplify dissenting views.
But then Penn has attracted more opprobrium for daring to speak out on his political views than any actor since Jane Fonda, not least for his reports of his trips to Iraq and Iran for the San Francisco Chronicle, and for his paid-for ads criticising the George W Bush administration.
The reality is that comparing Penn with the mannequin who stood in for him is deeply unfair on an actor and director who, unlike some of his Hollywood fellows, has shown a genuine commitment to humanitarian work and advocacy which, while not to everybody’s taste, cannot simply be written off with a handful of snide jokes.
In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, while other celebrities came and went, including Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and Susan Sarandon, Penn stayed on, eschewing the Oloffson hotel, where most based themselves, and living in the camp he set up for displaced people. Those who encountered him, like this author, found him approachable, genuine, passionate, articulate and committed.
Popular opinions
And while it is true that some celebrities have said foolish things regarding their political convictions, as many do, it is also true that on the right, in particular, there is a peculiar belief that entertainers, viewed as a kind of public property, should not have ideals and certainly not convictions of a progressive nature.
Both acting and politics are in Penn’s blood. His father, Leo, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the US, was an actor and director, who supported the Hollywood unions and was blacklisted after refusing to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The influence of his hard-drinking father, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross as a bombardier, was immense. “My father was the only guy everyone knew who had no enemies. He was the noble thing,” he recalled in an interview after Leo’s death.
While his childhood appears to have been a happy one, Penn has described feelings of remoteness and being cut off, which the critic John Lahr suggested later fed into his choice of roles of such outsiders as Harvey Milk and Samuel Bicke in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
If there was a difference between Penn and his father, as he admitted candidly to Lahr for his New Yorker profile, it is that his “dad loved humans and humanity [while] I’m good on humanity”, suggesting a certain misanthropy.
Political ambition
And Penn’s interest in politics has been long-lived, going back to his teenage years. At 11, he stencilled a quote from Thomas Jefferson on his bedroom door: “Our children are born free, and their freedom is a gift of nature and not of those who gave them birth.”
Later, he has admitted, he became obsessed with Watergate, which inspired a brief desire to be a lawyer until poor grades and a burgeoning interest in the Super 8 films he made with his brother Chris and friends, including Charlie Sheen, took over.
By then, Penn had been inspired by a new wave of actors, Robert De Niro foremost, to consider acting, dropping out of junior college to study method acting and winning his first lead role as a stoner surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in which he drew heavily on his experiences as a Malibu surfer.
The roles that followed would mark out a singular talent, as disciplined and hard working on the screen as his life was often chaotic off it, not least in his altercations with the paparazzi, including one in Macao whom he hung by his ankles out of a ninth-storey window. Penn also served a month in jail for punching a fan. His relationships too — including marriages to Madonna and Robin Wright Penn — have not been much less tumultuous.
Infinite attention to detail
Writing in 2008, the veteran film critic Roger Ebert summed up his appeal as an actor. “Sean Penn amazes me. Not long before seeing Milk, I viewed his work in Dead Man Walking again. Few characters could be more different, few characters could seem more real. He creates a character with infinite attention to detail and from the heart out.”
More recently, however, Penn has admitted that while he still enjoys a “love affair” with film he prefers to direct and has completed a string of films — The Crossing Guard, Into the Wild and The Pledge — as intelligently conceived as his acting roles in films such as Mystic River for which he won his first Oscar.
For now, however, it is his political views that have pushed him into the spotlight again. And while it is has been easy for some to criticise him for his friendships with the likes of the increasingly autocratic Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, when Penn discusses his beliefs he comes across as articulate as well as angry and curious about the world.
His abhorrence of war — and his sympathy for its victims, foreign and US — appears heartfelt. “I was born in 1960,” he told CNN last autumn, “so the primary television show that my brothers and I grew up watching was the Vietnam War. I grew up in a family that was opposed to it.” Despite that, he felt uncomfortable with an anti-war movement “calling our troops baby killers when they returned”, which appears to have discouraged him from becoming involved with more organised political movements.
And while he has been criticised for his visits to Iraq — before and after the 2003 US-led invasion — examination of his position reveals a more nuanced position than the one-word judgment adopted by his critics: “Traitor.”
His late brother Chris once called Penn’s idealism a kind of “innocence” that he shared with his father. Penn has described much of this passion as a lack of “tolerance” for the way in which issues, such as aid to both New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and to Haiti, was overcomplicated.
Walking the talk
Indeed, it was precisely because of Katrina that Penn was pushed to become more practically involved, “pissed off” at the disastrously slow progress of the rescue effort that led him to lead a mission to the stricken city, an experience that led directly to his founding of the J/P Haitian Relief Organisation.
His anger, he has admitted, has been sometimes toxic both in defence of his privacy and in his anger at the world and in his relationships, which led him to describe himself at one point as “damaged”. Yet it is precisely this intimation of anger that makes him such a compelling actor to watch and a powerful advocate.
While he may have mellowed a little with age, his passion remains undimmed. “Listen,” he said last year when asked how he would like to be recalled. “I don’t want to be remembered angry, but I’m willing to continue being angry about a few things.”
If Penn has any view on the recent criticism in the British media of him, it seems likely it will echo his 2004 note to Parker and Stone after Team America was released: “I never mind being of service, in satire and silliness— I do mind when anybody who doesn’t have a child, doesn’t have a child at war, or isn’t or won’t be in harm’s way themselves, [encourages] irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation and death of innocent people throughout the world.” He signed it: “All the best and a sincere fuck you.” —