Into the Wild

Call of the Wild
Actor-Director Sean Penn Explores the Backcountry Inhabited by A Solitary Man

By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 27, 2007; C01

TORONTO

Here's the man-bites-dog story of the Toronto International Film Festival: Sean Penn is a happy man.

Last year, Penn was busy incurring Canadian wrath by daring to smoke a cigarette inside a hotel during a news conference, resulting in a fine for the hotel and high dudgeon from the Ontario government. This year, Penn is back as writer and director of "Into the Wild," which had a triumphant premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and opens in Washington tomorrow. Lighting the first of several Marlboro Lights, having solicitously asked, "Are you okay with cigarette smoke?" and opened a window first, he eagerly dives into conversation about his new movie, which he adapted from Jon Krakauer's 1996 bestseller about Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate whose solitary sojourn to the backcountry of Alaska ended in his death.

To devoted readers of "Into the Wild," which has become a watershed generational text on a par with "On the Road" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Penn's movie will no doubt prove a faithful rendering of Krakauer's by turns dispassionate, unsettling and deeply affecting chronicle of McCandless's final two years.

But to anyone who's paid attention to Penn over the past 25 years, the movie is vividly, even uncannily, inscribed with the cardinal themes of his own life and career, from the restlessness of a man given to solitary cross-country road trips to the obsessive search for authenticity that sometimes borders on the self-destructive. Impulsive, charming, compassionate, manipulative, brave, cruel, foolish, uncompromising, infuriating: It's difficult to know, when talking about "Into the Wild," whether one is talking about McCandless or Penn -- even when Penn himself is talking.

"This movie brings up questions about reckless risk," Penn allows. "But what I want to say to people when they question the risks he took, whether it was related to the suffering that happened to the family as a result of the loss of his life, you know, I venture that most of the young men and women fighting, particularly the men, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, the biggest part of it is a rite of passage. It's, 'Am I up to this?' -- forget the politics totally when I'm talking about this -- and that's a tradition that at times has been a very noble thing; at other times it's more controversial. But in either case, in a young person, it's always noble to pursue something that in Western culture, in the United States, has been homogenized. There are no more rites of passage that will just present themselves for you to survive, and protect the people you love. So you have to go in pursuit of it, and without that you miss the boat."

* * *

Penn, 47, speaks in paragraphs, his words rushing out in a deep, gravelly torrent. But he mumbles, his chin tucked in toward his chest, his hand splayed across his face, consigning his pearls of insight to the life line of his left palm. That wouldn't be worth noting were it not for the fact that it's so at odds with the persona of a man who has fiercely devoted his life to being heard, whether as a performer, polemicist or provocateur. "Forget the politics," says the man who just returned from visiting Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and who once took out a full-page ad in this very newspaper to protest the run-up to the Iraq war. Not likely.

But as important as politics are in describing Penn, the notion of pursuit -- heedless, headstrong, hot pursuit -- probably best defines him, or at least the version of his life the American public has been privy to since he made his screen debut in "Taps" in 1981. A year later, he took the lead in his iconic performance as stoner Jeff Spicoli in the teen comedy "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," a role that looked deceptively simple but that announced to astute observers that here was an actor of rare assurance, sensitivity and intensity underneath the bong-happy half-mast eyes.

Just as he was making his mark as an actor, it seemed, he was seeping into the public consciousness in other ways, first as a Hollywood "bad boy," marrying, fighting and finally splitting with Madonna, then settling into a comfortable role of husband, father and Thoreauvian citizen activist, admired and derided in virtually equal measure.

Sean Penn is a road rat, a reader, a clotheshorse and a gifted mimic, especially after a few drinks, if his friends are to be believed. Those same friends describe him as the consummate outsider and, as such, the quintessential American: inquisitive, testing, physically tough, disarmingly self-deprecating. He's an outsider even in the profession. In 1996, after his wife, Robin Wright Penn, was carjacked with the couple's two children outside their Malibu home, Penn moved the family to Marin County, where they live on a piece of walled property neighbors liken to "a small liberal arts campus." If such a physical shunning of Hollywood wasn't literal enough, Penn has taken eccentric, even controversial doglegs from the brand of liberal activism that town is known for.

While his colleagues sign petitions, host the odd fundraiser and stick to safe causes, Penn has been something of a lone wolf: In 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq war, he spent almost $60,000 to take out that full-page ad, an open letter to President Bush, begging him not to invade Iraq ("Help save America before yours is a legacy of shame and horror"); he later visited Iraq and Iran to write articles about his impressions for the San Francisco Chronicle. Last month, he visited Venezuela and spent two hours with Chavez, resulting in a photo op with the leader that Penn's handlers, if he allowed himself to be handled, might have nixed as ill-advised. (Such is the catnip Bill O'Reilly and the "South Park" team have come to rely on.)

Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein assigned Penn to write about his Middle East trips, he says, "because I thought it would be interesting for us and our readers, because this is his home town, to have a guy with his sharp eye for detail and character apply that eye to what was going on in Iraq and, more specifically, Iran." Penn wound up writing two series of articles for the paper, in contentious editorial processes that Bronstein describes as "a lot of healthy and not-so-healthy debate." He adds with carefully considered understatement, "I would say there was some melodrama there about changes in the copy." (Like their author, the stories were ridiculed when they were published; like their author, they're smarter, funnier, less inflammatory and more stylish than their public image suggests.)

Although he admits he's still a little ticked at Penn, Bronstein evinces cautious admiration for the limbs he's willing to shimmy out on. "Life is often lived as if you had a mirror around your shoulder, and you're constantly looking in the mirror saying, 'How am I looking?' Life is a constant check and calculation. I think for Sean, that seems to be considerably less so than for others."

Art Linson, who produced "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and has since become one of Penn's best friends, confirms Bronstein's impression. "You can't be an actor if you don't want to be liked," he explains. "But here's one guy who likes to be liked, but is perfectly okay if he's not. And that's a rare one."

Perhaps nowhere was Penn more lambasted than in New Orleans in 2005, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Penn filmed "Dead Man Walking" and "All the King's Men" there. The writer and historian Douglas Brinkley, who met Penn through their mutual friend Hunter S. Thompson, got a call from Penn a few days after the storm hit. "He said, 'I'm getting a plane and bringing supplies to Louisiana, and I've got a list of people who can't find loved ones, and I'm going to find them.' And he did."

The image of Penn brandishing his gun in a boat and literally diving into sewage-contaminated, potentially toxic water to save a schizophrenic woman became iconic: to his fans, of his singular brand of moral agency and cockeyed, in-your-face courage; to his detractors, of yet another dilettante movie star looking for some earned publicity. Count Brinkley in the former camp. "He's direct action. He's incapable of sitting on a sofa and watching something that bothers him morally and not doing something. He doesn't stop and ponder consequences or media fallout, he just does it." (And he was holding the gun aloft, Brinkley adds, to keep it dry.)

* * *

It's no less true for being a truism that Penn may be the finest actor of his generation; he wouldn't need an Oscar to prove it but he has one anyway, for his performance in 2003's "Mystic River." That outing was marred by at least one unforgivable hambone moment (no one should be filmed screaming at an overhead camera), a reminder that even an artist of Penn's prodigious gifts can occasionally put a foot wrong ("spectacularly retarded," wrote David Thomson of his Oscar-nominated performance in "I Am Sam"). But just think of all the bravura turns: "The Falcon and the Snowman," "At Close Range," "Dead Man Walking," "The Thin Red Line," "Sweet and Lowdown," "She's So Lovely" and, most recently, "All the King's Men."

To discern a through-line, says Stacy Peralta, who directed the skateboard documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys," which Penn narrated, "look at what he hasn't done." Peralta explains: "He hasn't taken the Nicolas Cage route, which is start in indies and go into the gigantic blockbuster films. Could you even imagine how many opportunities he's had, how much temptation he's had to do that? And everybody wants a big paycheck, no matter how pure they are."

Penn's refusal simply to follow the money has alienated him from most of the movie business, says his longtime film editor Jay Cassidy. "The thing that aggravates people in Hollywood about Sean is, usually when you have a young actor and you dangle stardom, they just come," Cassidy says. "And he wasn't interested in that. He liked the craft of acting, and he certainly liked whatever credibility and power you got from success, but he was not interested in stardom in the classic sense. He simply follows his own path."

It's possible to theorize that the very qualities that make Penn a great actor -- his instincts, spontaneity, willingness to respond honestly and with unbridled commitment to whatever he sees or hears -- is precisely what informs his particular brand of activism. The two, it seems, are of a piece, a seamless whole comprising equal parts audacity and vulnerability. Says Peralta: "That doorway that artists go through, for a lot of people it takes a lot to get to. In my observation, Sean lives in that doorway. You can literally be with him and see him slip right into it. You can see how flushed he gets, how open he gets. And when you slip into that doorway, you sometimes can become a fool. That keeps most people from doing it, but from him, I don't sense any fear of it."

"Yeah, it's one thing," says Penn, who has gotten up from the couch to pace, found another chair, and gotten back up to re-situate a reporter's recorder. "To me, waking hours function on a tool belt, and one of the tools in my kit, for better or worse, is moviemaking. But if that tool doesn't work for the project -- the project isn't movies. The project is a life worthy of death, you know? So I try, to varying degrees of success or failure, to pick the right tools for the thing. But it's one project."

* * *

Much of "Into the Wild," which stars Emile Hirsch as McCandless and Catherine Keener, Hal Holbrook and Vince Vaughn as some of the people he befriended on his travels, takes place on the bus where, for 113 days, McCandless lived in the wilderness north of Mount Denali, surviving on what he could shoot with his .22 rifle, fish out of the nearby rivers and forage in the surrounding brush. It was an extraordinary feat of survival, which ended fatally after a tiny mistake; still, McCandless's story enraged longtime hunters and outdoorsmen who excoriated the young man as dangerously naive, with no respect for the rules of the wild he so floridly romanticized.

It all sounds familiar to Penn. "I think courage envy is a brother to a certain body-part envy," he says in what seems a well-rehearsed dismissal.

"God forbid someone will go out there and say, 'You know, I actually want to feel the life that I'm living," he continues. "And then, if I make it back, I'm going to know that woman next to me, that man laying next to me, that child laying next to me. And I'm going to know that person suffering on television. And I'm going to know the people in other countries. I'm going to feel the world."

Penn is talking about McCandless -- or is he? "There's no doubt that he's making a movie about his own sense of integrity, and his own sense of arrogance, too" says Linson, who co-produced "Into the Wild." "And his own sense of making mistakes and realizing later that he's made them. It's a movie about all kinds of things, some noble, some ignoble, that reflect on who Sean really is, and all of it's true."

Comparing "Into the Wild" with Penn's previous directorial efforts ("The Indian Runner," "The Pledge" and "The Crossing Guard"), Linson says the story "allowed another part of his heart to come out that the other movies didn't require." Linson predicts that this will mark a new chapter in Penn's career, dominated by directing more than acting. "I think acting's very hard for him. He's said it many, many times." (The next day, it's announced that Penn will play slain San Francisco City Council member Harvey Milk in a movie directed by Gus Van Sant.)

It's true that McCandless hurt deeply the family he left, and that he consistently deceived the people he met on the road, using an assumed name ("Alexander Supertramp") and lying about where he was from. (He was from Annandale, Va., but he claimed to have roots in South Dakota and West Virginia.) While not shying away from McCandless's contradictions, Penn still clearly identifies with his wanderlust and will to reinvent.

"The thing that was triumphant to me was the way this guy was able to rebirth himself and live a complete life, all the way from birth to this kind of wisdom-of-years time," Penn explains. "I don't believe in big catharsis during a lifetime. I've never seen any, ever, and I'm not that interested in it, frankly. I like the idea that we just have a ground, we're on it, that's okay. And the courage that it takes to become yourself in the face of death only enhances the drama and the emotion to me."

Penn goes on, reaching for ever more heady philosophical, even spiritual heights. "We all get so confused in asking, 'What are we here for?,' " he says. "We don't understand the here, that's why we keep [questioning] it and fighting over it. So accept the here and ask, What is it I'm going to die for? Why not figure out what's a life that's going to end worth dying for? It doesn't mean you try to die, it doesn't mean Chris McCandless tried to die. . . . It's pursuit of completing things to justify your own death."

Penn keeps on talking, the words still rushing out in a deep, throaty cascade. Even when a publicist comes in to give the high sign, he doesn't let up. He'll stop only when he's forced to, whether by marketing demands or mortality itself. And it's impossible not to notice: Sean Penn isn't mumbling anymore.

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