Johannesburg - The engagement is off. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Sean Penn is a difficult person. That said, he should even be more complex to live with.
He was made for reel life, not the real flesh and blood version.
If Benoni loves her golden girl Charlize Theron so much, someone from the former mining town should have awoken her to this fact. Madonna was not going to do it for them.
In the movie Mystic River, Penn plays his heart out as ex-con Jimmy Marcus whose daughter – played by Emmy Rossum – is murdered.
The scream he lets out as he approaches the scene of the crime is real, gut-wrenching. No acting school can teach that.
Ask those who conferred an Oscar on him for this why his performance was so worthy of decoration. But be warned, they are likely to consider it a rhetorical question.
Even in the movie, one gets a sense that Dave (Tim Robbins) and Sean (Kevin Bacon) consider it their utmost luck that they do not share Jimmy’s space. But as Murphy’s Law would have it, it had to be his child whose death they have to account for, and to him.
Penn is a lovable enigma, if that is not an oxymoron.
He also has a daughter in I Am Sam, a 2001 film, where he plays a mentally challenged man, Sam Dawson, who fights the system that wants to remove his daughter from his care.
He overshadows the precocious talent Dakota Fanning, who plays his daughter, Lucy, in the film. He is not acting, but rather living the character.
To paraphrase quip master and football coach José Mourinho, in some countries this performance should have won Penn 10 awards. After I Am Sam, it is highly possible that being “slow” came into vogue.
Fanning as Lucy must be the only person in and outside Hollywood who had a whale of a time sharing a roof with the soul that resides inside the 55-year-old Penn.
Penn’s personal life began to attract media attention when he tied the knot with Louise Ciccone, better known by her stage name Madonna, in 1985.
Their relationship was characterised by violent outbursts against the press. The two divorced in 1989.
When Penn, who was a tad inebriated, bumped into Madonna at an awards function in the company of a new toy boy, a fetish she’s confessed to, he couldn’t resist a jibe: “I see we have another child,” he reportedly said.
Penn’s marriage to Robin Wright was more tumultuous than the average volcano. Their first child, a daughter named Dylan Frances, was born in 1991 and their second, a son they named Hopper Jack, was born in 1993.
Fast forward to Charlize. When they went public about their romance two years ago, Benoni was beside itself with excitement and joy.
The city had not had an A-lister for a son-in-law. When Charlize made an appearance next to him in Cannes, we thought our boeremeisie had arrived. We were even giddier when they arrived arm in arm at the Life Ball in Vienna just after the premiere of Theron’s movie Mad Max: Fury Road.
But what Benoni, and South Africa, forgot is that Penn is no pushover. His name is not Stuart Townsend, Keanu Reeves or any of the other no-names Charlize bedded.
He is of the short-fuse variety.
So pop goes the national dream when she shows up alone at a May 31 event, the Critics Choice Awards.
Ouch! The real Sean Penn, of Bad Boys fame had shown his hand, that he was one. He was made to be loved by cinema fanatics, which Charlize should have known after a friendship allegedly spanning decades.
The Sunday Independent