Actor and director Sean Penn is primarily interested in feelings. And everything in it proves that emotions are more important than reason — simply because they do not know how to lie.
Once Penn as a director took part in the collective project «September 11». In his micro-novel, there was not a word about the ruins on the site of the World Trade Center, about the collapse of American greatness, about terrorists, and even about the victims. But there was an old man who lived in an apartment in the shade of a skyscraper, yearned for his dead wife and kept grooming the flower she once planted. The flower languished without light, and the old man loved him, because the little flower in the pot was the only thing that kept his connection with the deceased beloved. But one day the flower rose. Because light has been shed on it. Because the skyscraper is gone… In Penn’s ten minutes, not even ten words are spoken. But there are just a lot of feelings in it: bitterness, compassion, joy, hopelessness and hope. She is something like Penn’s life and professional manifesto. After all, Sean Penn is “about feelings”. It is them that he plays as an actor — passionate and absolute experiences. The ultimate fear of nothingness in 21 Grams. The endless despair of a father who has lost a child in «Mystic River». Fury without borders in The Turn. Mad lust for life in «Sweet and Ugly». Love without any conditions in «She’s so beautiful» … There is even more here: Penn plays a man who may have lost his mind, but who has not lost his lofty feelings at all, which, of course, is strange, but in the case of Penn it is quite convincing. Everything about Penn proves that emotions are more important than reason, because they are honest, because they simply do not know how to lie.
And by the way, it was Sean Penn who immediately agreed to star in the role of himself in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Barry Levinson. And Levinson planned, without embellishment and in the most caustic film terms, to tell what kind of human material Hollywood is made of. And he wanted eminent Hollywood people to play themselves as they are — eccentric, capricious to the point of comicality … For the same reason — that Penn does not value himself at all — Gus Van Sant chose him for the role of Harvey Milk, a rights activist sexual minorities, their first representative, who joined the government of San Francisco and was shot by a fanatic. After all, even homophobes will love such a Milk — he is wide open, he has nothing to hide. What makes him so vulnerable, fragile, touching … So touching, which can only be someone who does not know how to lie.