Movies were more fun when we didn’t know the personal politics of the people who made them. This applies especially to actors who presume that their movie-star charm makes their political point-making of interest to moviegoers. Sean Penn’s new film, The Gunman, is the most recent example of such grade-grubbing, self-annihilating propaganda.
In The Gunman, Penn plays Jim (Terry) Terrier, an American independent contractor, one of several international mercenaries who help foment unrest in the Third World. He’s seen building roads in the Congo in 2006 — a cover for his real mission as an assassin for a mining company that wants to depose the nation’s leader in order to exploit its resources with impunity.
Terry doesn’t reflect the open-hearted sacrifice of Sean Penn the humanitarian, who helped earthquake survivors in Haiti; rather, Terry represents the cynical Sean Penn who palled around with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez as a rebuke to U.S. foreign policy. Penn the citizen-ingrate certainly has the right to do this, but for Penn the artist it’s unwise — it shows a lack of sapience.
Instead of working to demystify global politics along with his own overly celebrated profession, Penn (who also co-wrote the film’s script) merely repeats familiar post–Cold War, multinational clichés, which limits the effect of his actorly emotional suasion. This doesn’t educate benighted moviegoers; instead, it minimizes their response to America’s role in world politics and dulls appreciation for cinema’s potential moral instruction.
Trading on his political prejudices vitiates Penn’s artistry: Unlike Penn’s unforgettable Jeff Spicoli, Terry is a mess of sentimental postures rather than a recognizable man. There’s Terry the international roustabout; Terry the great lover of volunteer medic Annie (Jasmine Trinca); Terry the lethal martial-arts expert envied by other soldiers of fortune (Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance); Terry the whistleblower who leaks secret video to the world court; Terry the martyr suffering a fatal condition — which proves to be a manifestation of his guilt. Plus, Penn is so muscled-up for these schizo traits, so ripped with bulging, vascular arms, that he looks like Popeye lost in a Sgt. Fury comic book.
With this film, Penn joins the Clooney–Damon–Pitt more-liberal-than-thou fraternity. The obvious model for The Gunman is Damon’s Bourne series, using ultraviolence to impeach America’s treachery even while commercializing and enjoying its inhumane kicks. The major difference is director Pierre Morel (of Taken), whose skillful staging of fight scenes outstrips the Bourne series. Morel comes from the Luc Besson school of socially pertinent action films, but The Gunman lacks Besson’s witty cosmopolitan insight. The international cast (including Idris Elba and Ray Winstone) just seem to be slumming, rather than being representatives of multiculti post-colonial Europe. Honestly, Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables jamboree series is a lot more fun than The Gunman, because Stallone’s camaraderie with his has-been peers ditches the heavy baggage of post-9/11 weariness and guilt. The Expendables sprints forward; The Gunman looks back and mopes.
At one point, Terry upbraids a former colleague for profiting off their “sins,” and later he confesses, “I’m tired of doing this s**t.” The villain’s response — “You have a high body count for someone who’s tired of doing it” — seems intended to indict America’s recent history of ongoing warfare. “There’s no war and peace,” the villain explains. “Only war and purpose.” (He and Terry speak the same bitter language.) The purpose of Penn’s cinematic war recalls Clooney’s assassin romance The American: another self-satisfied, pseudo-informed actor placing himself and his political “protest” in a dreary existential halo.
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Eugène Green is an expatriate American who specializes in Baroque-era theater and brings that interest (with its stylized cadences and thematic exposition) to movie-making. More brave and imaginative than Sean Penn‘s grandstanding, Green offers a striking and very moving statement on the era’s moral fatigue and soulful aspiration in La Sapienza (Wisdom). Instead of hiding behind superficial politics, Green nods to environmentalism but directly analyzes matters of conscience and consciousness.
Green’s title refers to earned knowledge and faith as well as to the chapel Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome. Demoralized architect Alexandre Schmidt (Fabrizio Rongione), who has devoted his career to designing materialist structures in contemporary Paris, pursues the source of his now-lost career motivation by studying the 17th-century chapel designs of Francesco Borromini. He journeys with his educator wife, Aliénor (Christelle Prot), to Italy and Switzerland, and they encounter a pair of teenage siblings, Lavinia (Arianna Nastro) and Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), whose innocent puzzlement throws light on the older couple’s marital despair.
Sex is an undercurrent in La Sapienza, but Green’s interest goes beyond erotic tension. His characters’ search for knowledge and contentment is a spiritual quest, with a score by Monteverdi. Green achieves one of cinema’s rarest and greatest accomplishments by visualizing transcendence — and, possibly, salvation.
Alexandre explores architecture to simultaneously scrutinize the material world and the modern condition. Remarkably, Green seems to be analyzing film narrative itself, focusing more on the nature of personal interaction and individual endeavor as evidenced in age-old works of devotion. Alexandre and Goffredo, Aliénor and Lavinia compare their feelings while Green observes the serene or artfully crafted inanimate world around them. When each character faces the camera (that is, facing each other, facing us) Green conveys a sense of immanence. This heady style rewinds ecstatic memories of Bresson, Antonioni, Godard, Demy, Resnais, Rossellini, Rohmer, even the artsy American Hal Hartley — no disrespect intended in placing him last.
Hartley’s contrived archness in films like The Unbelievable Truth, Surviving Desire, and Trust contained a genuine response to art-film history and used its patterns to trace modern American behaviors. Hartley’s ambitiousness is missed. He always seemed on the verge of immanence yet could never provide subtext to his self-conscious comedies. Green makes that leap — especially in a dream sequence where his characters sense themselves in visions of their forebears. When they’re awake, Green almost miraculously animates the spaces between them with the subconscious feelings they share.
La Sapienza puts movies back on the right path (especially after Richard Linklater’s truly juvenile and amateurish Boyhood). By seeing through his characters’ preoccupations, Green lets us see something greater.
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Since playing Michael Corleone, the second greatest character in all of American film (Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara tops the list), Al Pacino enters film history with enormous trust. He’s still trustworthy in Danny Collins, a small-scale comedy about the foibles of masculinity. Collins is a pop singer who has ridden his one-hit-wonder status into middle age, when he finally decides to find the son he abandoned during his sex-and-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll youth.
Rapprochement with his now-adult working-class offspring (Bobby Cannavale) isn’t easy. “You’re tall!” father tells son, sizing up the huge difference between them. But Danny takes it in charismatic, Neil Diamond–like stride. “I want to be in your life,” he says, and he becomes a real-life fairy godfather to his son. What Pacino must know about fatherhood and celebrity is made clear in Collins’s internal conflict with his manhood and artistic struggle.
Collins is another key characterization in Pacino’s gallery of authentic relatable American men. (His blind general in Scent of a Woman doesn’t count, but his Big Boy Caprice does; so does his 2014 performance as the Philip Roth surrogate in The Humbling – listen up, Alex Ross Perry: Imagine what truth Pacino could have brought to the non-truth of Birdman; it’s rumored Pacino turned it down.)
Director Dan Fogelman based the film on the true story of musician Steve Tilston, who received a letter from John Lennon that advised, “Being rich and famous doesn’t corrupt your art. Only you can do that.” Like La Sapienza, it’s an unfashionable dare, but Pacino and Cannavale give it feeling. Their stunning final scene should become as memorable as the one in Of Mice & Men. No facile political grandstanding in Pacino’s gallery. And that, Mr. Penn, requires sapience.
— Armond White, a film critic who writes about movies for National Review Online, received the American Book Awards’ Anti-Censorship Award. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.