Numbingly empty and insulting refugee porn
THE LAST FACE
Running time: 2hr 10min
Starring: Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem
Director: Sean Penn
A BACKDROP of Third-World atrocity serves as the canvas for a faux-profound Hollywood love story in Sean Penn’s stunningly self-important, but numbingly empty, cocktail of romance and insulting refugee porn, The Last Face.
Beautiful movie stars – Javier Bardem, sporting bedroom-chic stubble, and Charlize Theron, wearing dewy, no-make-up makeup – battle for 130 minutes to listen to their hearts while their souls take a hammering.
Penn’s body of work as a director has been uneven and often indulgent, though even flawed films like The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard have had admirable qualities and strong performances. His fifth feature, from a script by Erin Dignam loaded with platitudinous dialogue and shallow psychology, is arguably Penn’s first directorial outing that has pretty much nothing going for it.
Despite an impassioned speech by Theron’s character in which she urges wealthy philanthropists to see refugees as people with lives and families and dreams “just like us”, the film rarely gives individual identities to African characters. For the most part, the Africans are just bleeding wallpaper.
The main characters also have little definition beyond their roles in the field and their knotted relationship. Bardem plays Miguel, an orphaned Spaniard raised by the state, who achieved academic excellence in medicine and is fiercely committed to saving every life he can. Theron plays Wren, the daughter of a South African NGO founder, who has spent her adult life making up for not being the son her late father wanted. She now runs his organisation, Medecins du Monde, but only finds a sense of purpose once she’s on the ground. Or is it only once she hooks up with swarthy Miguel? “Before I met Miguel I was an idea I had,” she muses. “I didn’t really exist.”
The film traces their romance from its tentative start, after rebel forces closing in on Monrovia in 2003 force the MDM group to evacuate. Their story continues in a Sierra Leone refugee camp, punctuated by random acts of horrific violence and by Wren’s excruciating voice-over reflections about the “intoxication of intimacy” in this inhuman world.
Wren worries constantly about the futility of their intervention. She questions the value of saving a lucky few lives while the Western world remains wilfully oblivious to the devastating larger plight of a war in which children are being brainwashed into unspeakable barbarism. That and other factors lead to the collapse of her relationship with Miguel, who follows her back to her family estate near Cape Town to thrash out one final round of heartache in the weary vein of “Love me? You don’t even know me”.
Theron and Bardem are naturally charismatic actors, and Penn and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd rarely tire of studying them in searching shots of their pained eyes brimming with tears. But they can’t make these characters anything more than noble lovers in a world with no place for love. In the most hackneyed manner, they are bound together and torn apart by tortured feelings given far more weight by this clueless, trivialising film than the abject suffering to which they bear witness. – Hollywood Reporter