What on earth was Sean Penn thinking?
The Last Face 15 Cert, 132 min
Dir Sean Penn.
Starring Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Jean Reno, Jared Harris
Sean Penn has never made a film this bad before, with the possible exception of his gross segment from the anthology 11’09”01, which had Ernest Borgnine’s apartment flooded with joyous light by the collapse of the Twin Towers. Here, things get ominous as early as the opening captions, which talk of the link between Liberia’s 2003 civil war, and the equivalent in South Sudan a decade later, as “a singular brutality of corrupted innocence”.
That sort of nugget is bad enough, but then there’s the real kicker: apparently it’s also a bit like “the brutality of a love, between a man…” (and here the screen briefly fades to black) “...and a woman”.
Yeesh. Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem are the lovers, kept apart for that decade and reunited at the end of it. Their story, if it can even be called that, is an abject waste of time, and a cravenly focus-pulling foreground for the whole vain exercise. They meet when Wren (Theron), the daughter of a famous humanitarian worker she never stops eulogising, arrives in a Monrovian refugee camp to give medical support to the likes of Miguel (Bardem), a rugged hero of the field hospitals who has devoted his life to patching up the African wounded.
Embarking on an affair, they reconnect when they’re needed in South Sudan, during which time Wren has become the director of an international aid agency, pushing UN delegates for complete honesty in analysing the system’s failings.
She’s trying her best, and so is Theron, but it’s a tough ask engaging with the pair’s romantic and professional crises amid the relentless carnage surrounding them. They’re anguish junkies, cracking a smile only when Sudanese children pull cheeky faces, and the hardest couple to care about since Penn and Madonna.
At one point, the camera goes on a whirling 360° spree around the squabbling pair, while a multiple amputee is bleeding to death in the tent behind. Penn has hired Hurt Locker director of photography Barry Ackroyd, a dab hand at beady verité, to charge the film up with beauty and fury. But he keeps going recklessly over-the-top: the rapturous imagemaking during a flare-lit horseback raid which claims yet more black lives, is despicably, alienatingly pretty.
Hans Zimmer’s score isn’t any more sensible, rising to its most agonised world-music howl during a lovers’ tiff, rather than any one of the multiple scenes of graphic child slaughter.
The script, credited to Erin Dignam, pre-empts some of the more obvious complaints of warzone-trotting, but grappling with the existential problem of what a white person might do in the thick of African warfare feels like an ever-more-pompous goal for Penn to have set himself. Wren’s horrendously overwritten voiceover does nothing to bring us back down to earth.
Penn seems to be begging for credit, for being the type of caring-andsharing guy to alert our attention to a continent’s woes, but then he consigns those very woes to thoughtless, backdroppy, vacuous oblivion. TR