I’m sorry, but this statement, made by a possibly drunk Josh Brolin about his Milk co-star Sean Penn at the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony tonight, gave me one of my best laughs in, like, hours, maybe even days:
Brolin, after chiding Sean Penn for the actor’s self-seriousness (or was he chiding those who chided Penn for his self-seriousness? So hard to tell) had a whole riff, said in a deadpan voice. with theatrically long pauses.
“Quite an actor Sean Penn, quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing. [Pause] And now I’m an asshole. Like Russell Crowe. Because I’m not as smart as Sean. [Pause] Quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing actor. I’ve loved you in Milk, I thought what you did with that role was incredible. We’ve known you as an actor who doesn’t smile very much. And the fact that you smiled as much as you did in this film is amazing. Truly incredible. You are an amazing actor. You are going to get the Oscar. Because you smiled so much.”
The funny thing is, there’s a definite element of truth to this. Penn’s performance as Harvey Milk is fine on many levels, but the fact is, Penn himself has been so incredibly self-serious for years — both on-screen and off — that one of the reasons his performance in this film stands out so much is because he really does seem to be having way more fun than he has had in a long, long time. He seems to be showing an entirely new side of himself, and thus, he seems to be expanding his “range” as an actor.
It’s kind of like how Dianne Wiest won her second Oscar for Bullets over Broadway (1994) partly, I think, because her character in that film was such an over-the-top comic hoot, and such a striking force of nature, that she just stunned those of us who had gotten used to seeing her play the sort of mousy and/or whiny wives and mothers and whatnot that she had played ever since she won her first Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).
JAN 6 UPDATE: New York Post critics Lou Lumenick and Kyle Smith have posted their own versions of what Brolin said.
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