In 2003, I was just about to enter my twenties, and I was already madly in love with the movies and with acting and with thinking if I watched as many movies as possible, I could become a better actor, seemingly through osmosis.
One way to do that was to start going on Oscar Runs.
Seeing every movie that was--or could even possibly be--nominated for an Oscar.
That's how I wound up, at the impressionable age of nineteen, seeing Mystic River and thinking Sean Penn was turning in the greatest performance ever put on film.
And it all rested on one moment.
(Spoiler Alert if you haven't seen Mystic River even though it's decades old at this point.)
When Sean Penn's character arrives at the crime scene and realizes his daughter is the murder victim there, he flips out. He starts screaming "Is that my daughter?" A crowd of men have to restrain him.
It's the kind of raw and gut-wrenching moment that wins an actor an Oscar.
And it did.
Penn won his first Oscar for his performance in Mystic River, and usually, the clip they showed at all the awards shows, came from the "Is that my daughter?" moment.
It seemed as though the culture agreed that acting was whatever was happening in that instance on film.
Then...something shifted.
You started seeing comedic moments in other films reference the Sean Penn moment as something that was sort of...ridiculous?
The implication that it was too much, over-the-top, self-indulgent. The kind of thing that wins you awards, yes, but didn't that make it kind of distasteful?
Even though I doubt anybody could make a convincing argument that Sean Penn, of all people, would ever care about winning an Oscar, the suggestion was that presenting a character in that way was somehow disingenuous.
Now, when you go back and watch the film, it's hard not to view that scene through the readjusted lens. I tried to remember the admiration I felt when I first saw the movie, sitting in a theater, bowled over by Penn's visceral emotion.
Admittedly, watching it now in my living room nearly twenty years later, it feels...extra?
But does that say something about the film, Penn's performance, how things age, or how we view acting, and by extension, how we view people's behavior, particularly when it comes to grief and grieving?
A few years after seeing Mystic River, I saw a production of one of Shakespeare's history plays where one character is informed that another character has murdered someone she loves.
Her reaction was subdued. Subtle. Nuanced.
I remember thinking it was, forgive me, bullshit.
I'm not saying nobody reacts to bad news that way, but as someone who came from a very loud and very expressive family, I had never seen anybody react to even mildly bad news so calmly.
That, to me, seemed inauthentic.
It seemed as though the actress or the director or both were too scared to go there. To let that character crawl up the walls, scream, fall to her knees, tear apart everybody in sight out of rage and despair.
Maybe they thought it was more interesting to try another approach. There's certainly no shortage of Shakespearean performances where too much is done, so maybe they thought it would be a nice opportunity to show...something else?
But it didn't work for me.
It didn't ring true.
And part of what rings true is obviously very personal.
Something can only seem truthful to you if you've seen it yourself. As you get older, you see more, and so the coral of what can be considered truthful expands, but beyond that, you're able to imagine more, and so eventually, most things seem possible regardless of personal experience.
At least, that's how it's supposed to happen.
Now, when I think back on that Shakespeare production, I feel more charitable towards that actress. She wanted to present a more constrained portrait of grief and devastation, and there's nothing with that.
But why don't I feel the same generosity of spirit for Sean Penn?
Why do I--and many others--still not want to give that moment the right to exist and to label it as truthful when, in reality, it's probably far closer to most people's experience of sudden and unexpected death, especially violent death, than one that involves a barely audible gasp and a light hand to the heart?
Could it have something to do with how we feel about displaying our emotions?
Not just on film, but in life?
Five or six years ago, I went to a wake, and, you know, wakes are always awful. They're terrible. The deceased was an older woman, her death was not totally unexpected, but she was still somebody's mother and wife. Towards the end of the wake, one of her sons, a grown man, fell onto the casket and began sobbing loudly. It took two of his siblings and his wife to pull him away. He was calling for his mother. The whole thing was heartbreaking.
Afterwards, the person I had gone to the wake with commented that she thought he had "gone overboard."
I promptly lost my mind on them.
"What the #$% do you mean he went overboard? That was his mother. He lost his mother. I don't care if she was old. I don't care if she was sick. That was his mother. Of course he lost it. What he lost was his mother. What is wrong with you?"
As I was flipping out on this person, I could see in their eyes that their reaction to how I was berating them was the same reaction they had to that man grieving openly and unabashedly for his mother. They didn't understand it, and it scared them.
Once I cooled off, we got coffee, and they explained to me that, growing up, there was no hugging in their family. No crying. Not even that much laughter. Grand showings of emotion makes them uncomfortable, and for awhile, that would have been seen as a shortcoming on their part.
But by then, our culture had entered a new moment.
A moment that began to back them up and tell them that their discomfort with excess emotion was normal. Laudable, even.
A moment where singers who can hit high notes are seen as "trying too hard." Where people who put in a lot of effort are seen as "doing too much." Where all acting is film acting in the sense that you're supposed to telegraph everything you're feeling with a slight eyebrow raise and a twitch on the right side of your lip.
The more you can do with less, the better. And there is something to be said for that.
But imagine someone telling you that your daughter has been murdered.
I think you could argue that, in that moment, less is not more.
If the goal of acting, or one of them anyway, is to effectively communicate what a character is feeling based on given circumstances, how could the reaction to "Yes, that's your daughter, who you love deeply, and who you feel obligated to care for and protect, brutally murdered and left outside like garbage" be quiet and demure?
Again, I'm not saying somebody wouldn't react that way, but you'd have to build a character who could truthfully react in that way first, and if you watch Mystic River up to that point, nothing indicates that's how Sean Penn's character would react.
But our culture doesn't know what to do with the other kind of reaction. The truthful reaction.
It's too much.
It makes us too uncomfortable.
And what's more, we've determined that we've seen that before for years, and so now, you have to do something different.
Forget about the fact that in the entire history of humanity, if you put somebody's hand close to a flame, they're going to pull it away. It doesn't matter that it's what's always been done. Fire is fire. We all react to it the same way to it, because we're human.
And isn't it great that we still have those things that all of us react to the same way regardless of our experience? Isn't it important to remind people that those things exist?
Sean Penn probably doesn't care what any of us think about his performance in Mystic River. He got his Oscar for it. Then he got another Oscar for his performance in Milk. I'm not a big fan of straight actors playing gay characters, but I have to say, he is truly astounding in that role.
Actually, he's astounding in almost every role he's ever played.
Because he doesn't seem all that concerned with standing outside the performance thinking about how it'll be perceived or how it'll age or whether or not he looks cool or like he's doing too much.
He always seems to be resting somewhere deep inside all his characters, allowing us to see what we need to see, and every so often, giving us a glimpse of their vulnerability.
That's why that moment in Mystic River made such an impact when it first premiered.
Because while Sean Penn definitely had flashy moments in his career, seeing him like that? Nobody had ever seen him like that. It's a transformative point in the story that takes his character from one place to another, and the change justifies the outburst.
Because it's not just an outburst. It's a fire. His character is put not just too close to the fire, but inside of it, and then pulled out.
I've seen many portrayals of grief since then. Mystic River came along before the grief porn genre was invented and continues on to this day. Actors who can absolutely be seen lobbying for trophies by demonstrating how good they are at crying onscreen and gulping down sobs forcefully in a way that you never really do see people gulp in real life.
Recently I found myself watching a movie in that genre called Pieces of a Woman on Netflix and thinking--
Wow, this is self-indulgent.
But it's not because anybody was doing too much.
It's because it wasn't doing enough.
Funny how things eventually come back around.
Or maybe these days I just find myself wishing people wouldn't try to suppress so much of what they're feeling. It might also be the actor in me wanting to let loose without worrying I'd be called a ham.
In the film, Norma Rae, there's a scene where a group of men are trying to get Sally Field into a car. The director, in a questionable move, decided to play a mind game with Field, and told her that if the men got her in the car, she'd be fired from the picture.
"Do not let them put you in the car," he told her.
Field ending up breaking a few bones that day, but they did, eventually, get her in the car. The scene is powerful to watch, because it's clear nobody in it is acting. Not really. Field really does not want to get in that car and the men in the scene really want to get her in the car, and nothing about it feels like too much, because we understand that if somebody is trying to get you to do something you feel you truly can't do or it'll result in you being harmed or hurt or even killed, then you would look like a fool for not struggling as hard as you can to stop them.
So we let Field have her moment.
We even let her break a few bones.
And then she won an Oscar for it.
But nobody looks back at that film and thinks she was chewing the scenery.
Because we understand that she was doing what was natural.
But somehow, howling and wailing and gasping for air when being pummeled with tragedy seems unnatural.
Ultimately, it's not just how we view acting, but how we view each other. Our cultural attitudes and appetites because our opinions on real life.
It leads to us watching a man in agony over the death of his mother struggling to let her go and think "He's going overboard."
It makes us less compassionate. Less empathetic.
The fact that we can't imagine anybody feeling that much, caring that much, and experiencing the other side of that care and feeling to the extreme of it is really troubling to me.
While one of the objectives of art should be to help us with that perspective expansion I talked about earlier, the audience has to be willing to meet the art halfway. And while it's within their right to reject something as false, that rejection shouldn't be based on what they're comfortable with or what they perceive to be unattractive behavior.
As an audience, we should be watching and listening and thinking--
Can you imagine feeling so much?
Can you imagine being in that much pain?
How would I react if someone I knew was in that much pain?
Can I put myself in their shoes?
Can I put myself in the shoes of the characters trying to hold him down?
Is that how we should deal with someone whose racked with grief?
Have I ever felt grief?
Did I allow myself to feel it enough?
As you're reading through those questions, you might find yourself getting progressively more unsettled.
And I think that's the point--of the questions and the movie as well.
But they're all better questions to ask than--
Is this too much?
Because, really, too much of what?
At nineteen, nothing about that performance seemed like too much to me. We were still living in the shadow of 9/11. Of Columbine. We were engaged in an unjust war. People my age were being sent off to die everyday. We had a President who seemed both incompetent and insidious. Wherever you looked there was something to grieve.
Not much has changed since then.
But we've somehow gotten to a place where we think what needed to change was our reaction to all that grief.
That there was a special kind of numbness that could help protect us from it provided we labeled anybody and anything willing to embrace sorrow and react to it truthfully "too much."
Again, I ask, what does that mean?
Your daughter has just been murdered.
Somebody's trying to get you in a car against your will and take you god knows where.
People are dying and nobody seems to care.
How much is too much?
I went back and watched the movie for a third time. I tried to keep all this in mind. I got to that scene. I looked at Sean Penn's character crying out for his daughter, hoping it's not her and knowing it is, unwilling to go through stages of grief, because even that is a luxury, and so, letting the anger and the denial and bargaining all come at once, all rush into him at once, and he opens his mouth, and screams, and the other characters tackle him, and for a moment, it looks like he'll almost be strong enough to overpower him, because grief really is that powerful, and I thought--
That seems right.
Wow, I think, he got it just right.
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