In Contention

Tag: Sean Penn

  • Penn on Malick, part deux

    I originally posted this in the previous comment thread, but since the web seems to have latched onto this story, I think it’s worth highlighting more prominently. The media is determined to interpret Sean Penn’s fairly reasoned personal reservations about “The Tree of Life” as some kind of ego-driven attack — but before everyone starts taking sides in the Penn-Malick Celebrity Deathmatch, it’s worth reading the second half of his statement to Le Figaro, which doesn’t seem to have been translated by the English-speaking press. My rough translation below paints a rather more gracious picture:

    But it’s a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas. It’s up to each person to find their own personal, emotional or spiritual connection to it. Those that do generally emerge very moved.

    So, what we have have here is a statement of respectful artistic dissent from someone clearly still proud to have been involved with the picture. Not as much fun as a highbrow bitchfight, granted, but there it is. At ease, everyone.

    [Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]

  • Sean Penn bitch-slaps ‘Tree of Life’

    It seems actor Sean Penn is still upset about the fact that so much of his performance in “The Tree of Life” was left on the cutting room floor. I guess he and Adrian Brody can drown their woes in a few down at the pub. Said the actor to French magazine Le Figaro:

    I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

    The thing is, I don’t entirely disagree with him. The bookend nature of his role is the weaker element of the film, particularly the reprise at the end. But I do think the early stuff works because it’s a brilliant, human lead-in to the film’s central question: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Penn asking the almighty “Where were you” when his character’s brother died leads to the film’s extended cosmos sequence, and that is key, something I dug into when I wrote about the film at length in May.

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  • Diving back into ‘The Tree of Life’ (SPOILERS)

    If you’ve been fortunate enough to catch Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in its limited release already, don’t forget to tell us your thoughts in the reactions thread.

    I’ve written about the film at length once (during a lunch break at jury duty downtown after sleeping on it). Guy reviewed it in full out of Cannes, where the film walked away with the Palme d’Or, and we dedicated an edition of The Lists to Malick’s work earlier this week. But I wanted to include a separate space for spoiler discussion, as I’ve had a chance to re-visit the film and taken some time to mull over its particulars more over the last week. I guess I just really wanted to write about it again.

    So, if you want to stay pure, I suggest staying out of this thread. I’ll be digging into specifics of narrative and theme that you’d probably rather avoid. Or maybe you’d like to digest every morsel you can in preparation. Fully up to you, but the warning is there. SPOILERS follow…

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  • CANNES: What will win… and what should

    It’s a funny thing. For 10 days at Cannes, the Croisette hums with stimulating discussion and debate about movies; for the final two, all that chatter dissolves into a single blunt question: “What will win the Palme d’Or?” It’s a little like the Oscars, except without the initial stage of stimulating discussion and debate about movies. Let’s do it.

    On the one hand, I kind of want the beautiful, punishing 160-minute anti-procedural epic of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” to win, since there’s £140 waiting for me in London if it does. (Gamble responsibly, kids.) On the other, I can make more convincing cases for a number of titles. Unlike last year, when it was easy to single out “Uncle Boonmee” and “Of Gods and Men” for the top two spots, this year’s lineup has been higher in terms of median quality, as well as more contentious — which allows for a wider range of hypothetical jury-room arguments.

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  • REVIEW: “The Tree of Life” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Landscape has always been character in the films of Terrence Malick. The even, rolling fields of “Days of Heaven,” the sweatily green hill ladders of “The Thin Red Line,” even the dry-toast mesa of “Badlands”: all expansive, overwhelming environments that dictate the behavior of the films’ human occupants through sheer force of presence, for it’s often all they have to live in and live with. It’s an approach that, across 33 years of widely-spaced work, has drawn as many accusations of vacant pictorialism as it has rapt devotion — without the mystique Malick has accrued through his slow-loris work patterns, it’s difficult to say which camp might have emerged dominant — but it’s made for an oeuvre with a stylistic and textual throughline that belies its scattered production.

    Until, that is, “The Tree of Life,” Malick’s long, long delayed fifth feature that is at once his most interior work and his most grandiosely conceived. A fractured, impressionistic memory album documenting the roots of familial estrangement in a middle-class 1950s household in the director’s hometown of Waco, Texas, it arrives on the screen surrounded by bookends within bookends: scenes depicting the present-day social alienation of the family’s grown eldest son (Sean Penn), bracketed by vastly scaled sequences addressing more generalized concerns of theology, evolution and mortality.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘This Must Be the Place’

    The director: Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)

    The talent: Sean Penn (a Best Actor winner at Cannes back in 1997 for “She’s So Lovely”) pops up in his second film of the Competition, though this time in a clear lead role. Frances McDormand makes it two Oscar-winners on board, while the eccentric supporting cast includes Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne (guess he sanctioned the film’s title, then) and Eve Hewson — the 19 year-old daughter of Bono.  Byrne also contributed the film’s score, with original songs by US folk star Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy). Overall, however, the crew remains heavily Italian; Sorrentino’s regular (and regularly flashy) cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, is also on board.

    The pitch: Sorrentino’s first English-language feature — hardly a surprising move, given how his previous features toyed with Hollywood forms — sounds like a decidedly odd duck on paper. If you think the film’s various connections to rock royalty seem thematically related, you’d be right: Penn plays Cheyenne (!), a former Goth rock star living in wealthy retirement in Dublin, shaken out of his self-involved stupor by his estranged father’s death.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘The Tree of Life’

    The director: Terrence Malick (USA)

    The talent: Do you need reminding by this point? The Competition’s most high-profile film stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain; the name I’m most pleased to see in the supporting cast, meanwhile, is Irish stalwart Fiona Shaw.

    The technical crew is, obviously, first-class: DP Emmanuel Lubezki, Oscar-nominated for his work on Malick’s “The New World,” returns, as does the director’s career-long production designer Jack Fisk. Also returning from Malick’s last feature: editors Hank Corwin and Mark Yoshikawa (along with three others, including “City of God”‘s Daniel Rezende) and Oscar-nominated costume designer Jacqueline West. New to Team Malick is the industry’s current favorite composer, Alexandre Desplat.

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  • First still of Sean Penn in ‘This Must Be the Place’

    Or “Bigger, Better, Faster, More: The Linda Perry Story.” Paolo Sorrentino’s latest, due to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes next month, stars the two-time Oscar champ as a rock star turned Nazi hunter. Bernardo Bertolucci (due to receive an honorary Palme at the fest, by the by) reportedly describes the film (if not Penn’s Robert Smith wig) as “quite something.”

    [Photo: Premier PR]

  • Sean Penn to receive PGA’s Stanley Kramer Award

    The press release, in part:

    The Producers Guild of America (PGA), announced today that Sean Penn will be honored with the 2011 Stanley Kramer Award. The award will be presented to Penn at the 22nd Annual Producers Guild Awards ceremony on Saturday, January 22nd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles.

    The Stanley Kramer Award was established in 2002 to honor a motion picture, producer or other individual, whose achievement or contribution illuminates provocative social issues in an accessible and elevating fashion. Kramer, considered within the film industry to have served as “Hollywood’s Conscience” during his career as a film producer and director, created some of the most respected and successful works in the annals of American motion pictures. He was the master behind such classics as The Caine Mutiny, High Noon, The Defiant Ones, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

    Previous recipients of the Kramer award include such films as The Great Debaters, An Inconvenient Truth, Hotel Rwanda, Innocent Voices, In America, Antwone Fisher, and the 2010 winner was PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL ‘PUSH’ BY SAPPHIRE. Sean Penn is the first individual to receive the Guild’s Stanley Kramer Award, and the first recipient of the award in 2002 was the film I AM SAM, which Penn starred in.

    [Photo: 42 West]

  • Penn going supporting for ‘Fair Game?’

    Scott Feinberg is reporting that Sean Penn, who gives a rather wonderful performance in Doug Liman’s “Fair Game” with much more meat on its bones than Naomi Watts’s somewhat internalized work, will be pushed in the supporting category rather than lead.

    Uh…why?  First and foremost, I’d consider this a lead performance, but whatever, category fraud happens all the time and there are probably multiple perspectives to be had on this particular role.  But I just wrote about the lead actor category Monday and noted that there is some softness outside of the generally agreed upon three (Colin Firth, James Franco and Jeff Bridges).  The opportunity is ripe.

    Meanwhile, the supporting actor category seems to be settling in.  I feel like I’ve had the same five checked off for a month or two now.  Where are the cracks in that armor?  How does one look at that category and think it’s an easier climb?

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Leading men in the spotlight

    About a year ago I took to examining the 2009 Best Actor race.  The frontrunners for five slots seemed to be, in order, George Clooney, Colin Firth, Jeremy Renner, Morgan Freeman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Viggo Mortensen and Robert De Niro.

    A day later press members received their first invites to “Crazy Heart” screenings and were notified that the film would be released in 2009.  Jeff Bridges hit the ground running and never let off the gas until he was past the finish line.

    A year earlier we were looking at a pair of politico-biopic portrayals, either one of which would make a handsome winner: Frank Langella and Sean Penn.  But we were fairly sure the latter would be on his way to the podium one more time.

    But soon after, Mickey Rourke’s festival buzz caught serious fire and forged an atmosphere of doubt.  The season’s narrative seemed to be changing, and yet the early buzz carried through and brought Penn his Oscar.

    So that’s two drastically different directions – in as many years – that a lead actor race can take.  Given the mid-October fulcrum shared here, let’s consider our perspective on the Best Actor category right now.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 37 — The early year forgotten, Michael Douglas’s dueling Oscar campaigns, the animated feature race and more

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    After a week with four on the mic, it’s back to just Anne and myself as we mull over something of a slow news week. But there’s always some grist for the mill here and there, catch-up screenings, parties, etc., so let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Fair Game” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    The presence of Doug Liman’s name in the Cannes competition lineup has inspired many an unkind crack from an idle critic — this writer couldn’t resist a couple himself. There can’t have been many filmmakers to enter that lofty club immediately after a film as uniformly reviled as “Jumper,” an inept high-concept blockbuster that drowned Liman’s flip, clever-clever personality in lumbering effects and noise.

    Coming to Cannes, then, he has a dual point to prove: not only that he can hold his own among arthouse titans, but that he can even stand up against his own previous (now rather distant) best work.

    Has he succeeded? Well, yes and no. Liman has chosen something of a lazy shortcut back to respectability: a biopic, of an honorable-lefty martyr figure, with just enough Washington-thriller varnish not to frighten the horses. It’s certainly a curious choice as the lone representative of U.S. cinema in the world’s foremost international film contest, but it’s oddly appropriate, too: this is down-the-middle Hollywood craftsmanship, short on innovation and revelation, but effective and engrossing with it. For better or worse, there’s nothing else like this in Competition.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Oscar nominee fields

    Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's ListIn exactly one week’s time, we’ll have a brand new list of Oscar nominations to pore over, pick apart and eventually file away in our subconscious with the other 81 editions of this annual collective. For Oscar geeks, nomination day is in many ways more exciting than the ceremony itself, celebrating a broader spectrum of work and throwing up far more surprises along the way.

    For all that, once the winners are announced, the nomination list as a whole tends to be disregarded, returned to only by trivia buffs and the geekiest of Oscar geeks. (Guilty on both counts.) And that’s shame, because a field of five nominees can often be more illuminating viewed collectively than even the worthiest of individual champions.

    Today’s list, then, is devoted to that most elusive of Oscar holy grails: the perfect nominee field.

    Yes, more often than not, the Academy will nominate several notable achievements in a single category. But rarer than hen’s teeth are the robust Oscar categories that feature a full house of five outstanding nominees, five contenders that would all be worthy of a win in any other year. No unremarkable coaster nominees sliding in on the coattails of a popular picture. No bad films with an expensively studio-bought  nominations. No filler. No fat. Just five superb achievements.

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  • The Great Performances: 2004

    Paul Giamatti in SidewaysIn Alexander Payne’s “Sideways,” Paul Giamatti gave the best performance by an actor in 2004, so said the New York Film Critics Circle, and how right they were.  So why, why, why was the actor denied an Oscar nomination?  Granted, it was a strong year, but his work was at the top of that heap and that snub was one of the biggest shocks of the year.

    Here was a man giving perhaps the finest performance in a comedic film since Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie.” His co-stars go were recognized, save for the equally deserving Sandra Oh, but the leading man, around whose performance the film stands, is snubbed.  All I can remember saying is: “Wow.”

    Certainly Jamie Foxx deserved the attention he received for “Ray” and Leonardo DiCaprio was astonishing in “The Aviator,” even though he drew some criticism for before too youthful in the role. Rubbish, I thought.  He was superb, inhabiting Howard Hughes as he must have been in those days, brash, cocky, wealthy and willing to do anything that interested him.

    Clint Eastwood was terrific in “Million Dollar Baby,” while Jim Carrey gave a wonderful performance in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — a marvelous piece of acting, in fact.  Equally fine, and dark, was Kevin Bacon as a pedophile struggling to start anew in “The Woodsman,” which was one of the most daring American films in a long time.

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  • The Great Performances: 2003

    Sean Penn in Mystic RiverThere is little doubt in my mind I am going to take some heat this week, so let’s kick it off right away with my belief that Sean Penn deserved his Best Actor Oscar for “Mystic River,” a performance of overwhelming ferocity and staggering emotional power.

    Yes, I too loved Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation,” and would have loved to have seen him win, but he didn’t, and frankly he lost to a stronger performance (in my opinion). I know it is a cliche to say the nomination is the reward, but I would hope that Murray would be happy with that.

    But there were so many great male performances in 2003!

    Robert Duvall was superb in “Open Range” as the wily old rancher who ends up in a gunfight for his life with his friend, played by the also fantastic Kevin Costner, by his side. Tom Cruise gave a great performance in “The Last Samurai” for director Edward Zwick, while Russell Crowe was again brilliant in “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” adding to his string of stunning performances.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: The more you know

    Abbie Cornish in Bright StarHere’s something I’ll bet a lot of you wouldn’t have guessed: once upon a time, when my pants were short and my South African accent heavy, I was a very good Oscar pundit. I won every pool going. I beat the lame TV critics’ guesses and laughed in their televised faces. When that got old, I entered a radio “predict the Oscars” contest and won ZAR200 in mall vouchers. (Okay, that’s $26 – it was worth more in the 90s.)

    Since those heady days of glory, however, things have changed. The internet came along, for starters, and proved to be a hell of a lot smarter than me. But my own predictions – particularly at the nomination stage – got more wayward by the year; gone were the days of going five-for-five in one category after another.

    When it comes to picking the winners, meanwhile, I’ve begun losing Oscar pools to my brother, a mostly disinterested architect with an uncanny knack for calling the Academy’s most gauchely sentimental instincts. (He nailed the Best Foreign Language Film upset by “Departures,” for example, simply by reading a one-line plot synopsis of each nominee. I can learn much from him.)

    Why the lapse in form lately? It’s simple, really: I’ve started seeing the movies.

    That is to say, I’ve started seeing the movies in time. Back in the days when I had no access to press screenings or festivals, I was wholly at the mercy of South African release schedules, which usually meant I was lucky if one of the Best Picture nominees landed before Easter.

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  • Risk addiction

    Nicole Kidman in DogvilleAfter some initial resistance, I’m getting chattier on Twitter lately. Yesterday, in a “best of 2000s” frame of mind, an enjoyable back-and-forth with some of you started after I idly asked which actor or actress has had the greatest decade on film.

    The suggestions came in thick and fast, some mathematically going by awards stats, others opting for more abstract criteria. Some names came up with particular frequency: it’s hard to argue with the choice of Kate Winslet, though with the peerless exception of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” I wish she had more stone-cold masterworks under her belt.

    Johnny Depp was a popular choice, as was Sean Penn. I liked many more outré suggestions, including a shout-out for Patricia Clarkson, though will admit to scratching my head over two people’s advocation of Clint Eastwood. (If we’re counting people who only appeared four films this decade, I’ll stick with Daniel Day-Lewis.)

    But I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who plumped for the same name I’d consider for the honor: Nicole Kidman. The actress has been at the receiving end of a lot of media snark lately, be it in a professional or personal capacity, but clearly she still commands respect for her adventurous script choices and rarefied taste in auteurs.

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