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SEAN PENN, THE DIRECTOR, GETS A SECOND RUN
FROM:San Jose Mercury News February 1992
``THE Indian Runner," Sean Penn's knock-out directorial debut, is finding new life on the art-house circuit. A warmly received entry at Cannes last May, the intense tale of two very different Nebraska brothers -- one a cop, the other a born hell-raiser -- was picked up by MGM/UA, and then promptly given the heave-ho.
It deserved better. Much better. Had it been widely screened last year, it would have found its way onto many critics' 10- best lists. It's that gutsy and assured.
Inspired by Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman," which is never heard on the sound track, "Indian Runner" (at Santa Cruz's Nickelodeon) is set during the late '60s and tells of Joe and Frank Roberts. Joe (David Morse) is the hero of Plattsmouth's police department, having just walked away from a highway shootout; Frank (Viggo Mortensen) is just back from Vietnam. His homecoming lasts about 10 minutes, just long enough to say hi to Joe and his Hispanic wife Maria (Valeria Golino) and give the parents (Charles Bronson and Sandy Dennis) who never understood him the slip.
The next time Joe hears about the black sheep of the family, Frank's in an Ohio jail -- cooling his heels for slugging a girlfriend who, amazingly, still stands by her man. Juggling a family tragedy (Mom's sudden death) and personal feelings of inadequacy (he lost his farm to the bank), Joe goes in search of his brother. His mission: To bring Frank home and show him, by example, how sweet life can be.
Frank initially says no, but a second family tragedy causes him to gather up his kooky girlfriend (Patricia Arquette, who is sensational) and head west. "Indian Runner," which takes its title from Plains Indian lore, is all about Frank's difficult adjustment and Joe's bull-headed attempts to save what's left of his family. Joe is no saint; he wants Frank around because he feels incomplete without him.
On the surface, this sounds like another excuse for a mawkish homecoming film, and we've certainly had enough of these in recent years. But Penn steers well clear of contrivance and sentimentality to deliver a harsh, deeply affecting portrait of brothers who never quite click.
Penn's inspirations are many (Steinbeck's "East of Eden," William Inge's "All Fall Down," James Foley's "At Close Range," which starred Penn and brother Christopher), but this doesn't keep "Indian Runner" from feeling edgy, original. Indeed, Penn's lack of experience behind the camera works to his benefit: We never know what to expect; we're his to play with and surprise. He's the artist as loose cannon.
Chief among this film's virtues are its strong day-to-day, season-to-season rhythm; its appreciation for the frozen Plains country; and its unerring eye for off-beat peripheral characters (a fat woman at a flophouse, a bearded lady catching a smoke, a gray-faced talker at a carwash). Morse and Mortensen couldn't be better. One is contemplative and scared of caring too much; the other is a sociopath who makes De Niro's "Cape Fear" villain look like a cardboard cutout. Likewise, the smart Golino and the instinctual Arquette complement each other beautifully. Bronson, his granite face beginning to sag and soften, is more open than he's ever been. His lonely widower is obviously drawn from real life (the death of wife Jill Ireland).
Besides being a first-rate Cain-and-Abel saga that, in its way, can stand comparison to "The Deer Hunter," "Indian Runner" must also be read as Penn wrestling with mercurial mood swings and the new sensations of fatherhood. He understands Frank's potential for what seem like senseless acts of violence, but he applauds Joe's compassion. If the contest of wills never seems like an all-out battle, that's because Penn refuses to take sides. It's enough that, in the end, the better man is left standing. This augurs well for Penn, who has made an actor-to-director crossover to rival Kevin Costner's.
HOW SEAN PENN FOUND NEW DIRECTION IN DIRECTING. HIS DEBUT EFFORT, "THE INDIAN RUNNER," IS NOW ON VIDEO.
FROM:Philadelphia Inquirer
June 1992
Sean Penn has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, so it should be no surprise that his life could be changed radically and pushed in what is literally a new direction by a song.
When he heard Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman," Penn's brilliant acting career came to a screeching, but entirely voluntary, halt. In the lyrics of the song - as he told the Boss himself in an urgent phone call - there was a seminal movie about the '60s. Penn went on to write and direct it in The Indian Runner.
Penn's debut, recently released on video (MGM/UA, $94.99), meant that a distinguished and original new voice joined the ranks of American filmmakers. Unfortunately, it also meant that the ranks of American actors suffered a grievous and irretrievable loss.
How big a loss?
If the nation's critics were polled, there is little doubt that Penn would be named the leading actor of his generation and the natural heir to the mantle of Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. True, Penn has never been a star like Tom Cruise, who starts lines forming outside the theater. And some of Penn's most admired performances were in movies such as The Falcon and the Snowman and Casualties of War that failed at the box office. But whether the picture was good, bad or indifferent, Penn routinely got the kind of reviews other actors kill for.
Nonetheless, when Penn brought The Indian Runner to the Toronto Film Festival last fall, he said he was done with acting, and he's kept his word with the same stubbornness that characterized his choice of roles in the '80s.
As a star-turned-director, Penn had to share the spotlight with Jodie Foster, who, between best-actress Oscars for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, made her own bow with Little Man Tate. Celebrity aside, Little Man Tate and The Indian Runner were certainly two of last year's most striking directorial debuts. Both were very warmly reviewed, and if Foster had more luck at the box office than Penn, that's nothing new for the volatile 31-year- old actor.
The tabloid feeding frenzy that surrounded his 1985 marriage to Madonna, which lasted 18 months, left deep scars. He remains a wary interviewee, but soon opens up when the subject is acting and movies rather than his guarded private life. In person, he is soft-spoken and thoughtful - a far cry from his rowdy public image.
Penn is not, of course, the first good actor to listen incredulously to the misguided instructions of a director and mutter, "I could do it better than this moron." Many have tried and more than a few have been proved right. But he insists he's never been the type to seethe with frustration on the set.
"It was never me saying that this guy doesn't know what he's doing," he said through the haze rising from an unbroken chain of cigarettes. "I'm not negative in that way. It's more how I would have done it differently. I was always seeing other options and approaches when I read the script and had my first reactions. I would have a picture in my head of how it should be done. Then I came on the set and it would be done from someone else's point of view. It's only frustrating when the other person's point of view is not strong."
Nobody is likely to argue that The Indian Runner lacks an opinion. Penn wrote the script (some of it in his trailer while filming the remake of We're No Angels with De Niro) after hearing the Springsteen song, which is from the Nebraska album (1982). "It immediately struck me that there was a movie there and I called him up and he agreed," Penn recalled.
Armed with Springsteen's blessing, Penn fashioned a dark and provocative drama set in Nebraska in the '60s. It pivots on the Cain-and-Abel relationship of two brothers, one an upright cop (played by David Morse) and the other an ex-con and drifter (Viggo Mortensen) who has just returned from
Vietnam.
The writing that brings out the tangled and conflicting feelings of the brothers is equally assured, and you have the sense that they represent two sides of Penn himself.
"When I was making it, I was at a time in my life when I was doing a lot of self-examination," said Penn, who is now married to actress Robin Wright and is the father of a baby daughter. "Specifically, I believe that all we need to know we know at birth and we then get sabotaged by society and what we are supposed to do and to believe.
"The characters in this story are facing a point in life when you have to decide how much you are going to compromise," he added.
If the theme of The Indian Runner is compromise, that's not a word that surfaces in describing Penn's work. He made an immediate impression in his first movie, Taps (1981), about upheaval at a military academy. He caught on as Spicoli, the surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and showed what real talent could do in generic teen comedy.
Although he has done comedy - the disastrous Shanghai Surprise (1986) with the then-Mrs. Penn, Madonna, and We're No Angels (1989) - Penn established his primacy as the brooding rebel in volatile dramas. An actor of boundless resource was revealed in Bad Boys (1983), At Close Range (1986), Colors (1988), Casualties of War (1989) and State of Grace (1990).
The bloodlines of that acting gift are easily traced - his father is director Leo Penn and his mother is actress Eileen Ryan. But he is comfortable and content to walk away from it all.
"I don't have any ambitions for an acting career," he mused after a busy decade that embraced 14 movies. " I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I do enjoy
directing. I've gotten to a point where even if it's a good movie, I'd rather spend the seven bucks and watch somebody else do the part than watch myself in it. I don't feel that way about directing. What you do is more tangible. In acting, you're always living in an imaginary world and trying to hold on to it."
And when people raise the comparisons with De Niro and Brando, as they do almost reflexively with Penn, he merely shrugs. "That's all media bull. Whether I'm a good actor or not, it's not what I want to do anymore."
A pessimist would say we've lost an actor who's a lot more than good. An optimist would counter - and The Indian Runner would certainly bear out the claim - that we have found a director who may one day equal what he achieved in front of the camera.
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