Sean Penn a rebel with some causes

By SHEILA JOHNSTON

When Sean Penn is worried or angry - and his films regularly call on him to be both - his bright blue eyes, with their surprisingly long lashes, contract into pinpricks, his brow crinkles even more than usual and the sharp planes of his face clench into a fist.

Few actors are his peer when it comes to agonised introspection or sudden, scary flares of physical violence - and nobody can match him in combining the two.

Madonna, to whom Penn was married briefly in the 80s, keenly described him as a "cowboy-poet". His work combines an intelligence and fine sensibility with the hard-living image of a good old-school American wild boy.

Off-screen, too, he can be pugnacious. It has been a while since his jail sentence - 32 days in 1987 for hitting an extra who tried to take his picture on the set of Colors - but he continues to impress as a guy one wouldn't mess with.

Lately he has thrown down the gauntlet through his writing. Penn has been an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq. He took out full-page advertisements in the Washington Post and New York Times to promulgate his views and has made two field trips to Baghdad in December 2002 and again last November, shortly before the capture of Saddam Hussein.

During his less fine hours - opposite Madonna in the terrible Shanghai Surprise (1986), or with Robert De Niro as convicts disguised as priests in We're No Angels (1989) - few predicted he would stay the distance.

He has generally played characters who are the opposite of likeable: complicated men caught between their demons and a basic humanity. So most of his films have been critical favourites which failed to make money.

He trumpets his disdain for Hollywood, moving to San Francisco with the actress Robin Penn Wright, and repeatedly announces his intention to retire.

But here he is, still one of the busiest actors around, his star still rising.

Last month Penn won a Golden Globe and secured an Oscar nomination - his fourth - for his role in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. The New York Times said he gave "not only one of the best performances of the year but also one of the definitive pieces of screen acting in the last half-century".

In person he seems unexpectedly nervous - vulnerable, almost - and speaks hesitantly in oddly formulated phrases, although his film scripts and journalism reveal him as a thoughtful, prolific writer.

Penn has worked almost exclusively with American directors, such as Brian De Palma (Casualties of War and Carlito's Way), David Fincher (The Game) and Woody Allen (Sweet and Lowdown).

"To an embarrassing degree I'm not much of a cinephile," he admits.

"I grew up as an audience for American films in the 70s when there were a lot of interesting things going on and I was influenced by them. I didn't have much interest in international cinema, but since then I've caught up a little bit."

He has been widening his horizons. He pops up briefly in the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg's eccentric sci-fi fantasy It's All About Love, although to watch him with all guns blazing you need to catch 21 Grams, by Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

His next film, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, is executive produced by Alfonso Cuaren, the director of Y Tu Mama Tambien. "You'd have to be asleep at the wheel not to be paying attention to what's been happening south of my borders lately with all these great film-makers," he says.

"My attitude is, 'Who'd have thunk it?' But here they are and I'm just in sort of the lucky box right now, catching that wave of them."

Even so, he confesses to not having seen Inarritu's red-hot first movie, Amores Perros, when he met him through Julian Schnabel and Javier Barden, with whom Penn had worked on Before Night Falls.

"They introduced me to Alejandro at a party and, after a short conversation with him, the next day I saw the movie. My reaction was to call him up and offer my services whenever he desired them."

In this aching portrait of three sad people facing death while longing to find some kind of meaning in their lives, Penn plays a terminally ill maths professor who receives a heart transplant from a man killed in a car accident. Perversely, he seeks out the donor's traumatised widow and initiates an affair with her.

The film is told in Inarritu's trademark edgy manner, shuffling storylines and time-frames, an approach that must test its cast.

"We had two scripts: a straight, linear version, which was how we approached it as actors, and the version that you see," Penn says. "What drew me was that it expresses something strangely closer to the way that we experience our day-to-day lives, our dreams and memories, than a literal chronology seems to. "

Penn was a no-show last month at the Golden Globes and has never turned up for the Academy Awards. "For about six months you are analysed as to your feelings about it and, most importantly, what you're going to wear," he shrugs.

"Then you're invited to be an extra in a bad television show, photographed clapping films that maybe you don't think a lot of.

"The Oscars recognise some wonderful things, and a lot of cringeworthy things happen also. I find myself bewildered often. Ultimately it boils down to a socially uncomfortable thing to participate in."

Nonetheless, he has announced that he will attend the ceremony at the end of this month, out of solidarity with Eastwood, whom he has described as "the least disappointing icon in American cinema".

Penn and Lost in Translation's Bill Murray are now the front runners for best actor. And, since Murray gives equally short shrift to Hollywood guff, it is delicious to speculate as to which man would make the more entertainingly abrasive Oscar acceptance speech.

Penn might well use the occasion for a little pointed political comment in the manner of Michael Moore last year.

Although his father, Leo, a television and movie director, was blacklisted during the 50s, he has never previously been a high-profile Hollywood radical or even especially noted for his left-wing views.

"I'm not a Democrat, not a Republican, not a Green, not aligned with any party," he stated in his New York Times ad. But now his activities have made him both a poster boy of the anti-Bush movement, and a prime target for anti-pinko diatribes.

Penn is one of the entertainers in the front line of attack from America's recent fusillade of bestselling books with titles such as Shut Up And Sing, The Terrible Truth About Liberals, Tales From The Left Coast and Off With Their Heads.

"I'm quite certain I'm much more authentically a patriot to the United States than my current President," he declares now. "We are not only actors and film-makers but also human beings who are provoked at certain times.

"Sometimes we happen to have a camera in our hand and a script ready, and other times there's a need for a more immediate sort of response. I don't think you can be a credible artist without making your voice heard when so many people are dying day after day after day after day while we sit there in comfort in the United States. People have an obligation to speak and I'm one of them."

Politics will also figure prominently in his next two films. The Assassination of Richard Nixon is based on the true story of a failed furniture salesman (played by Penn) who tried to kill Nixon in 1974 by hijacking an aeroplane and crashing it into the Oval Office.

"Yes, once again I'm in the feel-good picture of the year," the actor cracked ironically in an interview with USA Today.

And he's just about to start shooting The Interpreter, a thriller co-starring Nicole Kidman about an assassination plot at the United Nations.

"I wouldn't comfortably call myself a rebel," he says. "But there is a certain necessary level of dissatisfaction that's, as it turns out, important, because to be complacent is creatively criminal.

"It's a constant struggle to find your own voice and to be loyal to it. There's only a price to be paid for not doing that, as far as I can tell."

- INDEPENDENT

On screen

* Who: Sean Penn, Oscar-nominated actor

* What: Mystic River; 21 Grams

* When: Mystic River screening now; 21 Grams opening today