Acting on impulse

It is afternoon in Marin County, well past the lunch hour. In the Indian restaurant by the frontage road, the kitchen is about to close. There is the smell of curry and the sound of taped sitar music. In a corner, wondering whether the manager will bend the no-smoking law and let him fire up a cigarette at the table, Sean Penn is talking about work and life and these past 12 controversial months.

“E.L. Doctorow had a quote I’ve used a lot of times,” Penn is saying, a hard-shell pack of American Spirits weighing on his shirt pocket, “that the responsibility of the artist is to know the time in which he lives.”

The words come out in a rapid mumble. He is leaning forward, looking out at the empty banquettes. For all the menace in his public image, Penn in person is actually fragile-looking. He’s not tall -- maybe 5-foot-10 -- and he’s slight, like a mime or a dancer. From a distance, waiting alone outside this hole in the wall in a Travelodge just off the freeway, he looked lost and disheveled, pacing and smoking on the blank pavement like some little bohemian fugitive in a Sean Penn movie. Close up, though, he is clean-cut, with very blue eyes and very white sneakers, his face shaved, his hair puffed with what appears to be some sort of styling product. His untucked shirt looked from afar like denim; up close, it turns out to have been cut from something finer, more delicate.

It has been a year since Penn’s visit to Iraq turned him into the surprise face of the antiwar movement. The New York Post is still ragging on him (“Baghdad Sean,” its pundits were calling him at one point). Nor has that been the extent of his trouble. The courts are still sorting out a legal wrangle in which Penn claimed producer Steve Bing canceled a $10-million job offer after Penn questioned the then-popular invasion on the Larry King show. Plus, his car was stolen from the street in broad daylight in April, with two guns in it.

Penn’s personal dust-ups, however, have coincided with an especially fertile professional period, which has yielded two of his most interesting roles as an actor in many years. This fall, he will appear in two of the season’s more anticipated dramas, Clint Eastwood’s brooding thriller “Mystic River,” which opens Oct. 8, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s edgy “21 Grams,” set for Nov. 14. The first puts him in the hands of a respected Hollywood elder, the second in the sights of a budding and highly regarded Mexican artist.

Both are meaty roles, with all-star ensemble casts, and Penn’s name is again coming up in the context of Oscar nominations (he’s never won one). His performances are so disparate that the actor is almost unrecognizable from one film to the other, a chameleon-like trait that has characterized Penn’s work, from the stoned surfer dude Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to the convicted murderer in “Dead Man Walking” to the talented but repugnant guitarist in “Sweet and Lowdown.”

But the range of these more recent roles also has raised provocative questions about the intersection of an artist’s world and the work that channels through it. Penn did the first film before the Iraq contretemps and the second within hours of his return from Baghdad. (“He was smelling still [from the long journey] when he came on the set,” Inarritu said.) His immersion in the war issue, once he committed to it, mirrored the ferocity of his involvement in the dramatic projects.

Work and world, in other words, have been especially commingled for Penn this year, a development that he said he welcomes.

“If you surrender to your responsibility as an artist,” he says, his stubby hands graceful, his words slowing now, “you will automatically speak to it.”

An open letter to Bush

It was October 2002 -- a lifetime ago now, geopolitically speaking -- when Penn took out a $56,000 ad in the Washington Post to publish an open letter to President George W. Bush. The letter, which Penn said he wrote both as a father of two and as the son of a World War II veteran, called on Bush to slow a march to war in Iraq that was then gathering momentum. “Let us reintroduce inspection teams,” the actor suggested, repeating what was then a popular antiwar alternative.

The thrust of the ad wasn’t surprising, but Penn’s name was, a little. Although Hollywood is famously liberal -- Penn’s father, the late TV director Leo Penn, had been blacklisted in the ‘50s -- the actor had generally kept his political views low-key. Also, Penn isn’t “Hollywood” anymore, exactly. A half-dozen or so years ago, he moved to Marin County where he lives with his wife, actress Robin Wright Penn, and their children, a 10-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter. He was, he says, “tired of a lot of aspects of Los Angeles, the main one being raising the kids in a company town.” In the Bay Area, he wasn’t distracted “by people mainlining the sort of commercialism and compromise of spirit that goes with most peoples’ idea of [show business].”

The Bay Area, however, has its own, often-infectious distractions, one being a strain of progressive fervor that makes Hollywood look like a hotbed of moderation. Here, the question last year wasn’t whether the local majority opposed an invasion of Iraq but how the authorities would process the thousands of arrests they’d have to make in the protests. “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers were as ubiquitous as Giants T-shirts.

Here, low-key political views were the exception, and Penn’s ad was widely viewed as the least one might expect from someone of his stature. Still, it was noticed and applauded by Norman Solomon, head of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a San Francisco-based public policy group. Solomon had taken several public officials on fact-finding missions to Baghdad, and, though he had never met the actor, he wrote to Penn, inviting him to come along on his next trip. To his astonishment, he said, Penn said yes, squeezing a tour of hospitals, schools, poor neighborhoods and the Iraqi foreign minister’s office into a three-day window before flying to Memphis to shoot “21 Grams.”

Solomon said Penn was one among many potentially influential citizens he had approached in what was then an attempt to counter a mounting drumbeat of pro-war propaganda. “I do not personally care for celebrity culture and have never sought out or tried to hang around with movie actors,” he said, echoing the Northern California mantra on the subject of show business. But Solomon said the actor surprised him -- not only did Penn fly coach, he said (Penn one time took a lot of flak when he complained about not getting a private jet while promoting a picture), but he also talked about the issues with humanism and depth.

Nonetheless Penn was ridiculed by conservatives as a liberal elite whose impulsive act had undermined the appearance of American unity. Criticism worsened when the Iraqi government news agency predictably exploited his trip, falsely proclaiming that the actor had confirmed Iraq to be free of weapons of mass destruction.

“Hey, isn’t that Bono’s job?” snickered Craig Kilborn of CBS’ “Late Late Show.”

In fact, both sides had miscast Penn. Hardly a peacenik, he is a registered independent who in an appearance on “Inside the Actors Studio” had once named politics as the job he’d never want, under any circumstance. He spent a month in jail in the 1980s for capping a series of fistfights with an attack on an extra who tried to take his picture on the set of “Colors,” a gang movie. Months after his return from Iraq, one of the muscle cars he likes to drive -- a limited-edition 1987 Buick Grand National -- was stolen while he was eating lunch at a cafe in Berkeley. Among the contents: a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and a loaded 9mm Glock handgun.

(“I’ve had some very serious threats that have come my way,” Penn says, adding ominously, “I know exactly who did it.” Records show he received a concealed weapons permit in 2001 after persistent calls from an allegedly violent ex-employee whom he fired in the 1980s and who indicated he knew where Penn lives now. Berkeley police said the car was found abandoned in working-class Richmond and one of the guns turned up, with several rounds in it, in an unrelated drug search in Berkeley, hidden in a backyard barbecue grill. No arrests have been made.)

Penn says, as he did then, that he went largely because he didn’t believe the Bush administration’s rationale for the invasion and feared that questions weren’t being raised because too many Americans felt intimidated. “I was just frustrated with the kind of sense of the place that was being commonly accepted,” he says as the waiter sets down plates of naan and chicken curry. “It made no human sense to me as an observer, for better or worse, of human nature.”

Months later -- after Penn took out yet another national newspaper ad, this time to defend his earlier views in a 4,000-word statement -- government reports confirmed that the White House’s argument for war had been based, in part, on inaccurate assertions about Iraq’s nuclear capacity. A Harris Poll showed that by August, the majority of Americans no longer believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

“The facts are in, now, but to believe that then was supposedly treasonous. It was, ‘You didn’t believe your leaders! How dare you?’ ” Penn says. “Look, I would have loved to be a participant in the club of cowards, but it was full. There’s a waiting list. I was going to be 6 jillionth in line, and I don’t like lines. I haven’t heard a valid criticism of that trip.”

Controversial and busy

AMID such personal drama, Penn continued to make movies. His last major role had been “I Am Sam” in 2001, a sentimental drama about a mentally challenged adult in a custody battle, that had earned him his third Oscar nomination though the film itself received mixed reviews. Having dipped a reluctant toe into Hollywood’s more conventional, if lucrative, waters, Penn had gone back to directing, doing the American contribution to “September 11,” a collection of short films from around the world (due out in general release on Oct. 10) that had been done in response to the terrorist attackPenn had been interested for some time in working with Eastwood, who’s known as an actor’s director; Eastwood had talked to him tentatively about a part in “Blood Work,” the director’s 2002 thriller, but that hadn’t worked out, he said. “But we had a really nice time together and felt a lot of the same things about what was interesting to speak to right now in a movie,” Penn says.

When, some time later, the director approached him again, this time about doing a film version of Dennis Lehane’s novel “Mystic River,” “I immediately wanted to do it,” Penn says. The story hinges on the aftermath of a child molestation in working-class Boston and on the ways that that act of violence plays out a generation later when a murder occurs in the same neighborhood.

“It was a beast of a piece,” Penn says, “about the nature of emotional revenge and the way people see -- I guess the popular term for it would be closure.”

Critics who saw the film’s debut at Cannes this year applauded Penn’s performance as a grief-stricken ex-con who believes he knows whom to blame for the death of his daughter, and some claimed the film was robbed when it failed to win a prize there. The extraordinary ensemble cast also features Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne and Marcia Gay Harden.

But Penn says the film belongs to Eastwood, whom he called “the least disappointing icon in American film.”

“Yeah, he’s called me that before. Does that mean they’re all disappointing and I’m just the least?” says Eastwood, laughing. “Whatever -- I’ll consider that a compliment. My quote for him would be that he’s better than he’s rated, and he comes highly rated.”

The director, who worked for scale to get the drama made, was, incidentally, nonchalant about Penn’s trip and any residual effect its visibility might have on his box office.

“It was a, uh, different thing to do,” jokes Eastwood, a Republican, “but I think he got a bad rap. We weren’t at war when he went over there, and he’s entitled to his opinion. That’s the point of it being a free country, isn’t it?”

Working with Inarritu

Life and art intersected more immediately, however, when Penn went to work on “21 Grams” in December. In that film, Penn plays a dying man who, because of a tragedy, is given a second chance and feels compelled to repay his emotionally devastated benefactress, played by Naomi Watts. Initially, Inarritu said, he had imagined Penn in a grittier part that he ended up giving instead to Benicio Del Toro.

“I was four or five months, thinking, going around,” says the director, who had gotten to know Penn after the actor cold-called him on his cellphone in Mexico to compliment him after the debut of his first film, “Amores Perros.” In the end, however, the director said he was glad he ended up offering Penn the role of the more impressionable good guy, not least because Penn had arrived on the set directly from Baghdad and was emotionally tender.

“He was exhausted when he arrived, but you know I think it helped him,” Inarritu says.

“I didn’t analyze it consciously,” says Penn, who said he mainly remembers feeling “awake and alive and curious” when he came back from Iraq. Penn’s stripped-down performance is remarkable for its understatement and its almost naked communication of disorientation and pain.

“I think it’s really important to be able to feel your own life, and I had felt so numbed by what had been a kind of surreal saturation of what was going on in the Middle East, and what it was going to mean, particularly relative to my kids’ future and things like that,” he says. “I wanted to lodge what had happened into whoever I was.”

Now, he says, he plans to take a year off, having completed work on Niels Mueller’s “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” about a failed furniture salesman who snaps, blames the government for his troubles and decides to crash a plane into the White House. (Notwithstanding the political timeliness of that script, Penn says the film is based on a true story and he agreed to do it five years ago but the financing didn’t come through until this year.)

He has written one script for himself to direct, he says, and is writing another for Sam Bayer, who was Penn’s cinematographer on a short he did for a recent group film about 9/11. He may also do something more, he says, with his experience in Iraq.

“I started writing right away,” he says, but he isn’t sure what art he’ll try to make from his observations.

“Your life is what you bring to any story,” he says, finally getting the go-ahead to smoke from the manager of the empty restaurant. “This is a life craft. It’s ‘How do you feel? Who are you? What do you have to say?’ ”