The Last Face
Director - Sean Penn
Writer - Erin Dignam
Starring - Javier Bardem, Charlize Theron, Adele Exarchopoulos
I'm going to just spare you the suspense on this one. This is a fucking terrible movie. Stop. Don't get excited. This isn't The Book of Henry or even The Snowman. No, this isn't even similar to another Cannes failure about White people existing in foreign lands, The Sea of Trees. This is a travesty of a film that doesn't even have the dignity to let the audience laugh at it (except for sexy tooth brushing). I'm going to do the best that I can to prevent you from ever seeing this film. You'll read things here and imagine them being hilariously terrible but don't bother. Sean Penn doesn't play by normal rules. He imagines this as a grand epic romance that also showcases the plight of Africans and inspires us to action. Well, Sean Penn is a fucking moron.
So, what exactly is The Face Last? Well that is a tough question to answer. It appears to be a story of star crossed lovers meeting throughout various aid mission in whatever African country happens to have fallen into a state of civil war at the moment. Most romances tend to set their meet cutes in bars or in grocery stores on outside office buildings but not this one. The meet cute is Javier Bardem, doing his best sexy doctor, caring for a poor African child (small aside: if it sounds like I am describing the African characters as props, that's because that's what they are in this film) with the power of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The sparks really start to fly when he performs an emergency C-section on an African woman. one is already suffering from a machete to the throat, in the middle of the fucking jungle. That's what gets Charlize Theron (I can't even describe her performance, maybe perhaps, brain-damaged love-struck doctor???) going, but not enough to bump their sexy parts together because, you see, Javier Bardem hasn't brushed his teeth yet.
Describing that C-section scene leads to me to need to talk about the violence in this film. This is Saw level violence and gore. The opening credits montage features a leg amputation. There's a very graphic description of a rape victim's genitalia, a close up of a burned body, caution tape made out of human intestines, a pile of dead child soldiers all riddled with bullet holes and a child shooting himself in the head complete with massive blood spurt among things I probably have forgotten about because they simply got overshadowed. Sean Penn thinks that the best way to make us (and by us I clearly mean White people) care about the plight of Africa is to show the horrors of war and to sicken the audience into submission. Now, I'm no expert on public relations for Africa but perhaps it would have been easier to care if there had been even one local character in this film instead of using them as props used to try and build sympathy and to get his lovers in the mood.
Oh, yes, the violence gets Charlize and Javier in the mood and they do brush their teeth together in a serious take on Flight of the Conchords' "Business Time" because having sex. One would hope that if the plight of Africa was going to treated so poorly and the mission of the Doctor Without Borders-esque organization at the heart of this movie would be so muddled at least they would nail the romance. I mean, you've got Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem. How hard can it be to craft a semi-convincing love story between two of the best actors of the last 20 years? Surely Sean Penn felt love once in his life and could attempt to recreate that feeling on screen. Wait. On second thought, let's not. We don't need any spousal abuse in this. Surprisingly, that is the one thing that isn't actually in this movie. I guess all the violence is only cause by Black people in Sean Penn's world.
There's so much more to this film but I'd like to stop thinking about it and would like to end talking about the Chili Peppers because seriously, the music of the Red Hot Chili Peppers plays a way bigger role in this film that you would expect. Except that is a slight lie. It seems the producers only got the rights to "Otherside" so one song by the Chili Peppers play a way bigger role in this film than you would expect. For you see, the Peppers are Javier Bardem's favourite band. This fact is established when a helicopter pilot refused to take off until Javier acknowledges him as the one who gifted him a life changing CD. Javier plays the Hot Chilis for a young orphaned patient (because what African children have parents anyways?). He fucks Charlize to the tender sounds of the Reds. They even fight when Charlize accuses Javier of living up the image Anthony Kiedis sings about in a literal manner.
So there you have it. A romance about a sexy Red Hots obsessed doctor without borders who performs miracles not for the benefits of the Africans but for the benefits of his penis and the frail soft-spoken, possibly brain-damaged, other doctor who sucks so much at her job she can't help but fall in love with a competent one set in various war-ravaged Africans countries populated by a series of victims who only exist to make White people feel bad. Oh and Javier Bardem dies at the end, offscreen and announced by Charlize Theron's assistant poking her head into her office.
Schurmann Score - A 1/10 seems way too generous.
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