Richard talks Cannes and Xavier Dolan with the Canadian Press.
“I think he’s got probably a pretty good shot certainly at being taken seriously as a contender, even thought he’s up against the who’s who of international filmmakers like Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Paul Verhoeven, Sean Penn,” says Toronto-based film reviewer Richard Crouse.
“There are a lot of people here that are working at a very high level, but I’d suggest that Xavier Dolan is working at just as high a level.”
Sean Penn is back on the big screen this weekend in The Gunman, his first leading role in almost four years. It can’t rightly be called a comeback because he never really went away. Supporting roles in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Gangster Squad have generated column inches, but in the last five years he has devoted more energy to raising money for earthquake relief in Haiti than to being a movie star.
In the film he plays Special Forces military contractor Jim Terrier. By day he protects foreign workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo but he moonlights as a hired gunman for big corporations. His assassination of the Congolese Mining Minister forces him to flee the country and changes the course of his entire life.
It’s what Penn jokingly calls “geriaction,” an action movie starring a middle-aged actor. Other than that, don’t expect to hear him speak a great deal about his new film. “Honestly within a week after I’ve finished shooting a film I’ve almost forgotten it,” he said recently.
In February he was honoured with an honorary Cesar Award for “choosing his films with sensitivity and commitment.” At the ceremony the “legend in his lifetime” watched a clip reel spanning the width and breadth of his career, including excerpts from Dead Men Walking, Mystic River and Milk.
Later the actor said, “I remember playing none of those scenes. I remembered the movies [but] I saw myself in scenes with actors I didn’t even know I’d ever worked with!”
To jog Mr. Penn’s memory here’s a “compenndium” of some of his memorable roles:
1. In Milk Penn won a Best Actor Oscar playing the real-life Harvey Milk, a native New Yorker who became America’s first openly gay man to be elected to public office. Penn fully embraces Milk, from the thick New York accent that characterized his speech to the goofy grin that endeared the real-life activist to his supporters, both gay and straight.
2. This Must be the Place is a rare thing. I speak of that elusive beast Pennigma Seanun comoedia—the Sean Penn comedy. He plays a retired and world-weary American rock star living with his wife (Frances McDormand) in Ireland. This is Sean Penn like we’ve never seen him before. With poufy hair, black toenail polish and affected vocal cadence—like Andy Warhol on Quaaludes—he creates an intriguing, strange character.
3. In Hollywood dramedy Hurly Burly Penn played against type as Eddie, the hyperactive casting agent. It’s an emotionally raw performance—witness Eddie try and use cocaine to snort away his troubles—but one without the studied glumness that he frequently brings to the screen.
4. Fair Game could be re-titled One Hundred Minutes of Sean Penn Yelling ‘If We Don’t Tell the Truth No One Will!’ He’s Joseph Wilson the real-life whistleblower who claimed the Bush administration falsified information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Penn is passionate, crafting a performance so big it has it’s own gravitational pull.
5. Finally there’s All the King’s Men, a movie memorable for all the wrong reasons. Penn is a fine actor, but as Willie Stark, (loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long) he is so over-the-top it’s as if he’s acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast. It’s a vein-popping, arm-waving performance that suggests that maybe he should lay-off the Red Bull.
With the release of “The Gunman” Sean Penn joins the ranks of middle-aged actors looking to Neesonate their careers. Liam Neeson famously made the leap into action movies later in life, a move that has revitalized his career and generated millions of box office bucks.
Penn, fresh from the gym and frequently shirtless, plays Special Forces military contractor Jim Terrier who protects foreign workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo by day and sidelines as a hired gunman for big corporations by night. His he assassination of the Congolese Mining Minister (Clive Curtis) forces him to leave the country, his job and girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca) behind. Eight years later he’s back in Africa. This time around instead of killing people he’s trying to do some good but three armed killers determined to do him in throw his humanitarian mission off track. His past has caught up to him and if he is to survive he has to return to his old ways.
Thrillers don’t get much more generic than “The Gunman.” It has all the elements of “Bourne Identity” or “Taken.” There are exotic locations, guns galore and loads of handheld camera, what’s missing is the thrills. Despite suitably menacing performances from heavyweights like Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem (despite his Foster Brooks drunk routine), Idris Elba and Mark Rylance everything is so by-the-numbers it’s as if the script (based on the 1981 novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette) was written to pay homage to older, better thrillers rather than offering up anything new.
Sloppily written—the “mess with the bull and you’ll get the horn” bull fighting climax takes place in present day in Catalonia even though they banned the sports years ago—with clunky dialogue and loose ends galore—what happens to Annie’s adopted baby?—“The Gunman” is unlikely to give Penn the necessary Neesonudge to reinvent his career.
If you have ever day dreamed about saying the right thing or having a snappy comeback to an insult, there’s a little bit of Walter Mitty in you.
From the original 1947 film starring Danny Kaye to the remake directed and featuring Ben Stiller, the name Walter Mitty has been synonymous with a certain kind of person, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs.”
In the new film Mitty (Stiller) is a 42-year-old behind-the-scenes “Life” employee who spaces out so much his new boss calls him Major Tom. He’s a hard working but invisible sixteen-year vet of the magazine’s photo department even his official title, negative asset manager, sounds Kafkaesque.
He’s secretly in love with co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) but while he dithers with an eHarmony representative (Paton Oswalt) regarding contacting her on-line (even though her office is just down the hall) the magazine is sold.
“This month’s issue will be the last before going on line,” says smarmy corporate lackey (Adam Scott) and soon, he adds, “some employees will be deemed ‘non vital.’”
It looks like Walter’s head might be on the corporate chopping block when he loses a negative from legendary photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn). The picture is pegged to be the last “Life” cover ever, and if Walter can’t locate it, he will lose his job.
To find the picture he sets his daydreams aside and enacts “Life’s” motto, to see the world. His travels take him around the world and, at the same timer, closer to Cheryl’s heart.
Although Stiller appears in almost every frame of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” there’s no hint of the “There’s Something About Mary” Ben Stiller here at all. His take on Mitty is understated. The character’s moments get bigger and bigger as Walter begins to control his destiny, but Stiller never lets go of the core of what makes Walter, Walter. It’s his most subdued performance ever, and it looks good on him.
Wiig also displays her sweet side. There’s not a “little hand” (Dooneese from “S.N.L.’s” Lawrence Welk Show”) or bit of sketch comedy in the performance at all.
Both are quietly funny for the most part—a “Benjamin Button” daydream is the closest thing to punchline-setup in the movie. “My little heart is no bigger than a quarter,” says a mini-Walter, “but it’s filled more than Fort Knox.”
And, because this is a big Christmas release there is an unexpected superhero style action sequence where Walter Mitty tears up Manhattan in defense of his Stretch Armstrong doll, but for the most part it is sweet but occasionally twee.
The embossed “That is the Purpose of Life” slogan on an airport runway blurs the line between magic realism and silly sentimentalism but Stiller the director mostly subverts the mundane with the surreal as though he is following Walter’s own ABCs of everything you want in a man (or in this case director), to be Adventurous, Brave and Creative.
“Fair Game” could be re-titled “One Hundred Minutes of Sean Penn Yelling ‘If We Don’t Tell the Truth No One Will!’” The retelling of the ripped-from-the-headlines tale of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), whose job as an undercover CIA agent was exposed by White House officials in an attempt to discredit her husband Joseph Wilson’s (Penn) claim that the Bush administration had falsified information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is a different kind of spy story. There are no guns, no gadgets, just words—many of the yelled by Penn—classified documents and furtive meetings on lonely park benches. It does a nice job of recreating Bush era paranoia—“We don’t want this smoking gun to turn into a mushroom cloud!”—and exploring the chasm between truth and policy, but as a drama takes way too long to get to the meat of the story. Three quarters of the movie whips past before the central event, Plame’s unceremonious unveiling as a spy, happens.
The build-up is filled with nice details, like Scooter Libby’s (David Andrews) self satisfied smirk when he puts the plan to get revenge on Plame and her husband in motion, and the insight into the life of a spy who juggles a home life with international intrigue, but it feels padded. Also, director Doug Liman has made some very strange and almost unwatchable choices in regard to the camera work. His camera is a little too restless, constantly roaming, which, I suppose, is meant to give us a “you-are-there” feeling, but instead induces motion sickness, particularly in the boardroom scenes.
Performance wise, however, the movie is top notch. Watt works as Plame, and Penn is passionate, crafting an a performance so big it has it’s own gravitational pull that asks whether Wilson was really a truth seeker or simply a self aggrandizing opportunist.
“Fair Game” is a mostly interesting look at our recent past, too bad director Liman takes too long to develop the important part of the story.
It’s Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn in over-the-top-mode) has taken over the city—there’s brothels, booze and bad news all over. “I’m building a new city out of the ruins of Los Angeles,” says Cohen.
Corruption is the name of the game for everyone except Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), a honest cop in a crooked town. When LAPD Chief William Henry Parker (Nick Nolte) asks him to create a special undercover team to bring Cohen and his thugs to justice, O’Mara assembles the Gangster Squad, a group of cops who don’t mind getting their hands dirty.
“The Gangster Squad” will likely suffer from the inevitable comparisons to “The Untouchables” and “LA Confidential.” It grabs the atmosphere of post war LA from the latter and the storyline, almost beat for beat, from the former. There’s even a shoot out on a stairway, but this is a far more blunt object than either of it’s forbearers. In the first twenty minutes people are drawn and quartered, incinerated—apparently Cohen prefers medieval techniques—and there’s a vicious fistfight. Then it gets violent.
The film is possibly best known, not for its cast, which also includes Ryan Gostling, Emma Stone, Michael Peña and Giovanni Ribisi, but as the movie pulled from release following the Aurora, Colorado Century 13 massacre. Originally featuring a scene of gangsters randomly firing into a movie theatre, it was deemed inappropriate for release at the time. I’m not sure what they have replaced that scene with, but trust me, its removal hasn’t made the film any less violent in tone.
It’s a gorgeous looking film, with a pretty picture of LA’s glamorous nightlife and features dialogue by Will Beall who has clearly spent some time watching Raymond Chandler movies like “The Big Sleep.” Lines like “The whole city is underwater and you’re grabbing a bucket when you should be grabbing a bathing suit,” have more finesse than the story as a whole.
“The gangster Squad” is a period piece that spends a bit too much time exploring the down-and-dirty side of the story, but is an stylish look at a violent time.
Anyone who thinks that history does not repeat itself need look no further than the new Gus Van Sant film Milk for proof to the contrary. As the recent vote on California’s Proposition 8 proposal to “change the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry,” hangs in the air the movie’s story of San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk’s 1978 battle against Proposition 6 brings into focus how little has changed in the fight for gay rights. Dubbed the Briggs Initiative, Milk defeated the law which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California’s public schools.
Sean Penn plays the real-life Harvey Milk, a native New Yorker who, just after his fortieth birthday left behind his conservative, closeted life on the East coast for the more freewheeling San Francisco. “I’m forty years old,” he says, “and I haven’t done a thing I’m proud of.” When he and his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) bump up against the Eureka Valley Business Association’s “no gays allowed” policy Milk is pushed toward political activism. After several failed attempts at running for office, (and adopting the unofficial title of The Mayor of Castro Street), he becomes America’s first openly gay man to be elected to public office after winning a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977. His meteoric rise, though, is cut short the following year when he and Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) are assassinated by former city supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin).
In this politically aware time Gus Van Sant has made a biopic about a an important political figure that pays less attention to the biography aspect and more to the issues that came to define Harvey Milk’s life. We don’t meet Harvey until the eve of his fortieth birthday, just as his political awareness was starting to blossom. Eight years later he was dead, so, unlike the recent W., Oliver Stone’s look at George W. Bush’s life, which dug into the president’s past, Milk focuses its energy on the bigger picture of gay rights and how Milk became an icon and martyr for gay pride. Van Sant sets the stage for Harvey’s rise to prominence, effectively creating a sense of time and place with the liberal use of archival news footage and careful attention to 1970s period details. Van Sant’s use of grainy film stock completes the illusion, making this look like an artifact from the 1970s.
Penn fully embraces Milk, from the thick New York accent that characterized his speech to the goofy grin that endeared the real-life activist to his supporters, both gay and straight. (“I know I’m not what you expected,” he would say, grinning, to straight audiences, “I left my high heels at home…”) It’s a strong Oscar worthy performance, but this isn’t a movie about the performances and people as much as it is about ideas. Harvey Milk has already been the subject of several books and the Academy Award-winning documentary feature, The Times of Harvey Milk, so there is no mystery left to the story, but by focusing on the issues and Milk’s galvanizing fight for equality Milk achieves much more than a run-of-the-mill biopic could ever hope for. It’s about passion; it’s about when the ordinary man could bring about change with personal conviction, a bullhorn and no money. It’s about a man who didn’t consider himself to be a candidate, but part of a movement. It’s about a time when a community organizer could make a difference. On that last point, at least, it seems that history does indeed repeat itself.
Richard talks Cannes and Xavier Dolan with the Canadian Press.
