A few weeks ago, at the Filmfestival in Toronto, Robin Wright Penn behaved in such a way, as journalists expect and know only from her husband.

She sat on the podium and had an outburst of fury: `I can only say to those, who want to make him look small again: Fuck you!` She was loud, she foamed, her eyes sparkled and in the auditory it suddenly was very quiet. 

She was right.

Sean Penn, her husband, had just returned from a private mission to New Orleans. He had seen the TV pictures of desperate humans and he had seen how incapable the Bush government was, to react on `Katrina` - and then it was like it always was. He was in a rage. Penn decided to take the matter into his own hands. He called a few friends, set them into a plane, rented locally a small boat and saved 40 humans from the mud of Big Easy.

That is the true story.

In the US television and in relevant newspapers however they showed the Oscar-winner, how he scooped water with a cup from his boat. They made a mock of him and said, the boat had sunk under the load of the entourage and that Penn was so vain, that he particularly had flown in a press photographer, so that the whole world could see the pictures of the good samaritan.

That is the false story.

But in the meantime Penn has given up to correct each mischief, which is spread over him. That would probably be a fulltime job. So this time his wife spoke for him. `Down there in New Orleans`, she said, ` people are dying and if it had not been Sean Penn who said: `I must do something`, but any Joe Smith from Morgan City, people would thank him and not assault him.`

That is the Crux. Sean Penn, possibly best actor of his time, splits America like otherwise only George W. Bush does. Rights call him `Baghdad Sean` or `Saddam`s buddy` or simply `Son of a bitch`. The liberals love him for his commitment and his criticism of the Bush Iraq politics. Penn says: `I am no political activist. I am only a moderate, responsible citizen`.

Sean Penn is, above all, curious. He travelled to Iran, in order to investigate locally, how people live in that country. Penn observed the elections, spoke with intellectuals, with film producers, with feminists and politicians, wrote five strong, intellectual articles for the `San Francisco Chronicle`. He visited Iraq, before the invasion and after. He notes, absorbs, provokes, torments himself and his wife says, a marriage with Sean Penn is like `a beautiful torture`.

He can`t help it. He is driven and it is no coincidence that in his films like `Dead Man Walking`, `I am Sam`, `Mystic River` or ` 21 grams` he acts so authentically, only a breath or a gun shot away from the abyss. They are mostly broken figures, looking for answers and quarreling with the system.

Sean Penn is looking for answers. That`s his drive. When a child in Burbank, California, so his mother Eileen, little Sean was ashamed of the fact, that he originates from a comparatively wealthy parents house. `He always wanted to know, how life on the other side was`.
And he begins to ask early and he begins to doubt. What a country is this, in which his father, TV director Leo Penn, is suddenly on McCarthys black list? They say, Leo Penn, a decorated world war veteran, is a communist friend and so ` un-american`. Half a century later the right wing demagogues say the same about his son.

Young Sean Penn is deliberately looking for the outsiders and Hollywood rebels. He is a friend of Charles Bukowski, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando. He throws in LSD trips, drinks like a hole, smokes like a chimney. He travels with the `Hell`s Angels`. And he decides briefly to fly to Belfast - there the civil war raves - because he wants to see and understand, what`s going on there.
`I want to experience, how people live there with the constant threat of life`. Sean Penn sees bomb craters and burning houses at the border between catholic and protestant Belfast. But he does not understand the force, is getting frustrated and goes for ` a drunken odyssey of several days`.

Penn is looking for answers and he finds Madonna. At the wedding in Malibu he shouts to the guests from the balcony: `Welcome to the new filming of Apocalypse Now`. With these words he summarizes the process of their marriage rather well. The marriage lasts three and a half years and it is the most uncreative periode of his life.

He is at odds with the Paparazzi, pisses, so it is rumored, into a water pistol and fires it at photographers. Then he ends up in jail for 30 days, because of beating up an extra, who wanted to take a picture of him. It is a surreal time. The papers call him `bad boy` and `rebell` and some also `genius`.
`It was like it was. And perhaps I am today what I am, because I lived in such a way`, says Sean Penn, looking retrospectively at this time of his live.

Americans call this `living on the edge`. And up to today Sean Penn didn`t realy change that much. He refuses consistently to work for Mainstream Hollywood. `Most of the films today have no heart and no message`. He even considers from time to time giving up acting, `a tortur`, and working only as a director.

And he provokes.

Penn asks questions, that rather the media should ask. He criticizes the president, as rather the democrats should do. But the media and the democrats are silent. Penn cries out. Before the invasion of the Iraq he placed a full-page announcement into the `Washington Post` and writes an open letter to Bush: ` I beg you Mr. President, listen to Gershwin, read chapters of Stegner, of Saroyan, the speeches of Martin Luther King. Remind yourself of America. Remember the Iraqi children, our children, and your own.` However, it rains bombs on Baghdad and today the sound of Penns words is harder, more unyieldingly, more pointed. Today Sean Penn knows that he was right.

`The government`, he says, `has betrayed the principles of our country. The principle is only cowardice.  We even begin to celebrate this cowardice as courage. Now we have cowards such as Bush, cowards such as Rice and Rumsfeld and the whole fucking people, acting like John Wayne.` For comments like this, the conservatives stone him, but meanwhile he is accustomed to this. `I got as much bad press as Hitler and Gaddafi together and somehow I even like that.`

Sometimes his wife Robin looks in his tired eyes and thinks: `Perhaps eventually he gets exhausted of fighting and will stop it.` But naturally she knows that that will not happen, as long as so many questions are still unanswered.  Penn is now 45. He achieved everything in film business. He could retire and watch his children Dylan Frances and Hopper Jack grow up. He could. But he cannot do it. `The day I stop to advance my opinion is the day I give up.`

Sean Penn loves the books of Philip Roth. `Roth`, he says, ` has kept this absolutely necessary level of discontent. And I also would like to keep this level of discontent.`

One is forced not to begrudge this to him. Sean Penn is still needed out there.

Courtesy of VIEW Magazine, Germany,  www.view-magazin.de

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