Sean Penn’s lively Q&A at film fest
Sean Penn moved away from Marin a few years ago, when his marriage to Robin Wright went belly up, but he was back and in fine form Saturday, Oct. 7, for the 40th Mill Valley Film Festival, which honored the Oscar winner for his work, if not for his trademark aging-bad-boy behavior. Penn, who has had a frayed relationship with paparazzi, avoided media interaction before and after the event, which celebrated a notable and often artistically courageous career.
Photographers and reporters cursed the perceived diva gesture, while minutes later, a packed crowd and even video messages from cinema’s premier auteurs offered fervent notes of praise for the actor and director. The sequence
of events was a fitting encapsulation of Penn — one of the singularly great actors, and one who has been championed for his film and significant humanitarian leadership as much as he has been condemned for controversies in his personal life as a political rabble-rouser and a sometime journalist.
The tribute began with a highlight reel, one of two on Penn’s varied and storied career, including clips from such films as “Sweet and Lowdown,” his 1999 Oscar-nominated turn with Woody Allen, and “Milk,” the 2008 Harvey Milk biopic that nabbed him his second Academy Award. The first was for “Mystic River” in 2004.
After a standing ovation as Penn was introduced, a Q&A with festival founder Mark Fishkin and the audience moved quickly to the big picture, as Penn lamented the shift in film from the golden age of cinema in the ’70s to the medium’s current context.
“I think it’s a deceptive term to say we’ve ‘democratized’ it,” Penn said.
“There’s nothing much at the movie theaters I’m going to watch. I could love a film that’s made now,” he continued, “but I’m not going to love it in the way that I know it’s going to be a shared thing.”
Penn’s views about film, which he said were “not pessimistic” but “realistic,” often intertwined with a decrying of our culture at large and its relationship to the current political atmosphere, along with an unnamed “moron.”
“We’re that moron, too,” said the oft-political Penn, who at moments veered into the abstract. “We’re all animals, and we’re going to do what we do,” he said at one point, in a slightly ominous reference to the inherent potential of violence in the audience and the apparent need for self-examination about it.
“We’ve normalized garbage and superficiality and a very detached sense of human interaction,” Penn later said in response to an audience question, before advocating “interdependency” and the importance of voting.
Following a second highlight reel of Penn’s performances, the conversation became more grounded in Penn’s filmography, including his work with numerous acclaimed filmmakers.
He praised Gus Van Sant (“Milk”) — who sent a video message for the tribute praising Penn as “the greatest male actor ever” — for making films that each carried its own personality.
An undercurrent of Penn’s strong personality at times imbued his other comments. He described Clint Eastwood, who directed Penn’s Oscar-winning performance in “Mystic River,” as a filmmaker who had already proved he’d won the race, but Penn briefly acknowledged, “We don’t have everything in common.”
Penn referred to auteur Terrence Malick — with whom he has worked twice before (“The Thin Red Line,” “The Tree of Life”) and had publicly questioned following the final edit of his role in the latter film — as “the poet of cinema.”
“A complicated man. I could love him or hate him on any given Sunday, and he the same to me. Well, no, on Sunday he doesn’t hate anybody,” Penn said jokingly. “Me, I’ll still hate him.”
Before the afternoon concluded with another standing ovation and Penn receiving a tribute award, a final clip was shown of director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”), who directed Penn in “21 Grams.”
Iñárritu heaped praise on Penn as a friend, humanitarian and collaborator on the Mexican director’s first Englishlanguage film.
“And all that misbehaving, legendary thing is bull—,” Iñárritu added, to a burst of audience laughter.