Every movie we see: In The Gunman, Sean Penn demonstrates the art of ham
Bad enough that Sean Penn looks leathery, but apparently he’s been slathered with brown shoe polish.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to see a legal drama called And Justice for All. Its high point, which was also its low, was defense attorney Al Pacino yelling and foaming at the mouth at the judge: “You’re outta order! You’re outta order!” He was led out of the courtroom, but not before every Pinoy mume-Method actor had resolved to recreate that scene in his own movies (and harvested awards for it). Al has defined screen pyroclastics in films like Scarface and Carlito’s Way. When he cuts loose, you want to open an umbrella to protect yourself from getting drenched in flying spittle. (Apparently you’re supposed to do this at his theatre performances.) And yet I maintain that his deranged intensity was essential to those movies: you cannot be an understated cokehead megalomaniac. The derangement was the character. In Sean Penn’s case he will scream, contort his face, display his neck veins and threaten to go full Scanners for no other reason than to show that he is a Great Actor. In some movies, it works. In other movies, it begs to be tasered.
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