Summer light fades to gold in Malibu. Surfers carve tasty waves just down the road. A beautiful woman wanders toward the pool house. She crosses paths with a sweet dog heading the opposite way looking for an ear rub.’s house. Small talk is made about how the coffee table in his living room looks like a junk drawer just exploded on it. There are sunglasses, prescription bottles and a device that shoots salt at mosquitoes. Nearby are photos of famous people, all smoking.
Penn tells me he became convinced his only choice was to destroy his Oscars. “I thought, well, fuck, you know? I’ll give them to Ukraine. They can be melted down to bullets they can shoot at the Russians.” Running on a semi-parallel path has been Penn’s political work. It first surfaced in 2002 when he flew to Baghdad and called bullshit on George Bush’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He correctly predicted the terrible cost of American boys going to fight ghosts in the desert, earning him many foes in the freedom fries caucus.
Sometimes it’s not clear what role Penn is playing as he appears live from this year’s hot spot: Journalist? Activist? Global gadfly? Penn says he’s not a journalist — he wryly offers in “Superpower” that he’s no Walter Cronkite — but merely a concerned citizen who knows his celebrity status can provide him an all-access lanyard to international actors.
“After the Arab Spring, all the pundits were saying, ‘He’s gone in 30 days — it’s over,”’ says Penn. “And now it’s five years later. How’d that happen? Aleppo is on fire. What’s going on?” Penn busied himself with more morally substantial work. In 2019, he converted his Haitian relief organization into the Community Organized Relief Effort, a global disaster relief group. He begged and wheedled the well-heeled in Hollywood for donations, often resulting in angry frustration. Meanwhile, his film career had ground to a halt except for a voiceover in “Angry Birds” and a film with angry man Mel Gibson — 2019’s ill-fated “The Professor and the Madman.
The footage is remarkable. It is Feb. 24, 2022, and Russian troops have invaded Ukraine. Tanks cross the border, missiles slam into Kyiv and paratroopers are landing at the airport. Millions of refugees begin streaming westward. According to Penn, any thought of meeting with Zelenskyy on the 2021 trip was scuttled by a lockdown of his government after a purported intelligence leak to the Wagner Group, mercenaries allied with Russia.