Rising With the Tide

“Message in a Bottle” may be the movie that finally gives Robin Wright Penn the kind of breakout role that could make her a Hollywood star. But to listen to her tell it, Wright Penn won’t be leaping to do another major studio project any time soon.

A year after shooting “Message in a Bottle,” she recalls the experience as a frustrating one. Too many opinions from too many people that ultimately have nothing to do with the movie you’re going to make--and too little creativity, says Wright Penn of the making of the Warner Bros. film that opened Friday.

Ironically, this is the very movie that may establish Wright Penn as an A-list leading actress. After a supporting role in 1994’s blockbuster hit “Forrest Gump,” followed by several smaller films (most recently “Hurlyburly” and “She’s So Lovely”), Wright Penn carries the new movie that features her in almost every scene. (The film also stars Kevin Costner and Paul Newman.)

Wright Penn says she was drawn to the movie because of her admiration for director Luis Mandoki’s work in “When a Man Loves a Woman.” But it didn’t quite work out the way she would have liked.

“You’re working for a studio,” the 32-year-old actress says during an interview near her Marin County home where she lives with her husband, actor Sean Penn, and their two children. “It’s not you and the director and the other actors making the movie. I had thought there were going to be less people making that stew.”

Adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling novel, “Message in a Bottle” is a lusciously filmed romance about a lonely, divorced woman, Theresa (Wright Penn), who finds a lyrical testament of love in the form of a message in a bottle. Employing her expertise as a newspaper researcher, she tracks down the sender, who turns out to be a mournful widower named Garret (Costner), who sends missives into the deep blue sea that express his longing and love for his wife.

Naturally, Theresa, an isolated single mother, falls for Garret, sight unseen. She then sets out to meet him.

“It’s a tear jerker,” admits Wright Penn, who says she struggled to make the film less mawkish. She had hoped the screenplay would be trimmed--”thin it out so it wasn’t so in your face and precious.” But, she notes, “you never accomplish everything you want to accomplish.”

Indeed, some reviews have commented on the film’s sometimes over-the-top sentimentality. Wright Penn’s performance, however, is winning raves. The Times film critic Kenneth Turan said her “classic beauty, formidable integrity and complete believability even in a flimsy role are fresh enough to make an impact.”

And while some might sneer, droves of preview audiences (especially women) have had a good cathartic cry at this double-hankie weeper. Mandoki says that he got to make the movie he wanted and he’s happy with the final result. “The studio listened and respected my opinion,” he says. “I feel good with the movie and I don’t feel that my vision was changed or violated in any way.”

While he described their relationship as playful, Mandoki suggested that Wright Penn was initially wary.

“In the beginning, before she got to know me, my sense was that she felt that I was maybe catering to some commercial studio kind of agenda, but I don’t direct from that place,” he says. “I had three producers and they were all giving feedback. But as a director you just have to be strong.”

Still, Wright Penn felt that the abundance of opinions created some tension. “It wasn’t awful. [But] it was different from doing, for instance, ‘She’s So Lovely’ or ‘Hurlyburly.’ [Those films] were a collaboration of the people who should be collaborating in the artistic part of making a movie,” she says.

“Let the other people be on the phone and deal with the money and the scheduling . . . But don’t get involved in our thing and we won’t get involved in yours.”

While Wright Penn had praise for Mandoki’s work, the director did reveal that the two did not always see eye to eye. “We had our disagreements and they were great because they were beautiful creative battles sometimes,” says Mandoki. Although he did not specify the nature of their conflicts, he allowed that the actress “has very strong instincts.”

“When something doesn’t ring true, like a line of dialogue, or something in the scene just doesn’t feel right to her, she is somebody who is going to say it,” says Mandoki. “And what I learned working with her is that most of the time she’s right.”

Strong Feelings and an Ethereal Presence

In person, Wright Penn has a timeless, unadorned beauty. She wears little makeup and dresses stylishly and casually in velvet burgundy pants. Her comments are sometimes sharp but her tone is almost ethereal. She often speaks in the second person, which has the effect of distancing her from her own words. And like her husband, Sean, she has strong feelings about the right--and wrong--way to make movies.

Despite her complaints, Wright Penn says she enjoyed working on the film with Mandoki and co-star Costner. “I had always wanted to work with Kevin,” she says. “We had tried to work together once before on ‘Robin Hood,’ but that didn’t work out because I got pregnant.

“And then [working with] Paul Newman, of course, not too shabby.” She says Newman, who plays Costner’s warm but crusty father, “created a foundation. You have a veteran on board. . . . He’s . . . cut to the chase, get the job done and do it at a pace an actor should work.”

Newman calls Wright Penn a “dynamite lady, and a first-class actress. She’s like a piece of litmus paper, she just picks up the color immediately.” Asked about the chemistry between the two of them, Newman jokes, “At my age you have rapport, not chemistry.”

The hardest part of the shoot, which took place largely in Maine despite the film’s North Carolina setting, was being away from her young children. Wright Penn says she and Sean try to arrange their schedules so they’re not both away at the same time.

“We take turns working so that one of us is there while the other is on the job,” she says. “I’ve made that decision because it’s too hard on them. Why be a mother if you’re going to be gone half the year?”

Resolved not to raise their kids in Los Angeles, the couple recently moved to Northern California. The move was hastened by an incident of carjacking that Robin experienced in L.A. in 1996. “It made me want to get out of L.A.,” she says. “I always wanted to get out of L.A., but time passes and you find excuses to stay. This expedited the move; it was time to get out.”

From Texas to Europe to ‘Santa Barbara’

Robin and Sean settled on San Anselmo after they had driven through the town and liked what they saw. After their Malibu home burned down in a brush fire, they were living in rentals and were rather eager to build a home for themselves.

“It was either here or Paris, so we thought this would be more convenient to go to L.A. . . .

“It’s great up here,” she says of her new hometown, a quaint village where the locals seem oblivious to her stardom. During a recent interview, it was friends, not fans, who stopped her on the sidewalk to give her hugs.

Born in Texas, Wright Penn moved to Los Angeles, and later La Jolla, with her mother after her parents separated when she was 3. By age 13, Robin knew she wanted to be a dancer, and practiced the craft for some 10 hours a day. The dancing parlayed itself into modeling and commercials, including one Wright Penn recalls doing for Doritos chips. “I was kind of like doing a pirouette and holding the chips.”

But by high school, her goal was to travel to Europe. “I saved money by cleaning houses every day and the day I graduated, I got on a plane and went to Europe.”

After modeling throughout Europe, she returned to the States, where her agent encouraged her to try acting. In 1984 she joined the cast of “Santa Barbara,” a soap opera for which she garnered three daytime Emmy nominations.

“It was like going away to college or going to camp, doing the soap opera,” Wright Penn says. “It was great. Having had no training and no confidence and being very young . . . it taught you to be on your toes and a lot of technical tools to use.”

While working on “Santa Barbara” she auditioned for Rob Reiner for the title role in “The Princess Bride” and got the job. “I think I was one of the last girls to audition out of like 500,” she remembers. “Maybe that was to my advantage. They got burned out and said, ‘OK, we’ll take her.’ ”

The line is self-deprecating and revealing of Wright Penn’s attitude about her own work; she saves her harshest criticism for herself. “I hate everything I do. I hate my voice. I sound like a guy.”