Eddie Quinn turns to his wife Maureen and warns her against trying to figure him out. "You can't understand my obscurity," he says, "unless you have infrared vision." Actually, Eddie, the flailing loser played by Sean Penn in the new lower-depths romance She's So Lovely, is as easy to read as the funny papers. He loves the mouthy Maureen (Penn's own wife Robin Wright Penn) and will do anything to keep her or get her back. Penn, though, is a more challenging read: Studs Lonigan, say, rewritten by Brando's tougher kid brother.
He is Hollywood's most frighteningly talented pug--Oliver Stone calls Penn "the ultimate anti-all- American Boy"--yet he relishes the role of father. "Family," he says, "makes me feel there's a reason I'm alive." The perennial wild child also plays disciplinarian to his and Wright's son and daughter. "Robin is there for the battles," he explains. "I come in during the war settlements. Then there's no negotiations; I'm basically the atom bomb."
Even before his 1985 marriage to Madonna (they divorced in 1989), Penn had a rep as a ferocious scrapper, a plague on all paparazzi, a reluctant and truculent interview subject. These days Penn, who turned 37 this week and who married Wright last year after a long, volatile, off-and-on relationship, replies thoughtfully to a reporter's probes. What about Hollywood's embrace of independent films? "I don't trust that any more than I trust a mother-in-law's love." Is he happy? "I'm not going to accuse myself of being happy; just saying that would put me in a bad mood. But I am feeling productive. I'm feeling my life, which I didn't always do, partly because I'd be drunk a lot. Now there's a lot of good things going on."
One more twist. What Penn really wants to do is direct--and he has, smartly and obstinately, with The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard. But from friendship, and to help bankroll his directorial dreams, Penn has made half a dozen films in the past year or so. Friendship with the late writer-director John Cassavetes led to She's So Lovely, directed by Cassavetes' son Nick, for which Penn won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. And because Penn once met Terrence Malick in a bar and told him, "Give me a dollar and point the way," he is now acting in The Thin Red Line, Malick's first film since the 1978 Days of Heaven. This fall Penn will topline in two other major movies, Stone's U-Turn and David (Seven) Fincher's The Game. The fellow who eyeballs the future and says, "I think rare will be the case where I'll act," is in danger of becoming an A-list movie star.
She's So Lovely is the tale of two souls who are "mentally and emotionally retarded," Nick Cassavetes says. "They have one talent: they can love each other really good." Eddie, a small-time punk, is away when the pregnant Maureen is assaulted by a neighbor. Driven nuts by the news of her beating, he shoots a paramedic and is hospitalized for 10 years. In the interim, Maureen has married Joey (John Travolta), but that doesn't matter to Eddie when he gets out. He just wants his honey back.