Sean Penn takes things too personally

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2008)

Let me start by saying that this movie bored me utterly for an hour, but by the end I was bawling my eyes out, making noises like a little girl watching her brother tear the heads off her dolls. This is much more a testament to Sean Penn's script, and to the weight of the well-orchestrated cascade of editing choices in the final fifteen minutes, than to his overall directorial guiding hand.
This is, however, by far the best directing job by this director. When you let Sean Penn direct the movie you're going to watch, what you get (most of the time) is a very well-cast, well- (occasionally over-) acted, badly-lighted, indifferently written, not very well-directed American student film. (The American student film is definable as a combination of questionable taste and a linear story progression.) The coherence, the very point, of a Sean Penn movie is always in question, probably because Sean Penn is so much an artist that he feels too deeply to be as much a craftsman as is required of a director. He loves every single element with the same fervor, which is okay for an actor, since he's not in charge of the whole show. But a director has to make more choices than an actor has to make. A simple problem for which there is no simple solution. Notice that competent but less torturously gifted actors - Clooney comes to mind - make an easier transition to directing American movies. You gotta be free.
So this movie is even more of a surprise, because by about the hour ten mark it starts to break away from its restraints of theme-hammer and moral-tong. Soon it is just a road movie. The protagonist, and much of the first hour, in a strange retroactive way, begin to make sense as simply aimless journeys in and of themselves. This may be simply a happy marriage of Penn's tendency to defocus, or it may be intentional. But it is a glad thing.
And the construction of the final sequence proves that if he really needed to, Penn could direct ON GOLDEN POND type Hallmark movies for a living and never go hungry. I do not mean this as an insult, not at all. But I suppose he might take it that way.