Mother courage

Actress Robin Wright Penn. (MJ Kim/Getty Images)

It is a late fall day during the Toronto International Film Festival and publicists and journalists ribbon silently through a giant hotel suite. Tucked away in a far corner, small behind a big table, is Robin Wright Penn. Even though she’s seated at a distance, the fact that she is anywhere in this vast room – so clearly a blonde, stunning movie star, despite her muted makeup, cigarettes and professional efforts not to be – creates a strange hushed texture, as if everyone is trying not to wake a baby.

“Have you seen the film?” she asks before I sit down.

Uh, yeah — have some of the people sitting in this chair to interview you not seen Breaking and Entering?

“That’s what it usually is. Journalists sit down and say, ‘I haven’t seen the movie. What’s it about?’” She does an unflattering impression of a journalist’s vapid up-talking, then sighs, tucking one of her thin denim legs beneath her.

It’s a brave person who admits his own lack of insight to Wright Penn, who is nothing if not serious. She is, at 40, an accomplished actress best known for parts in Forrest Gump and The Princess Bride, though the bulk of her oeuvre is independent films like Sorry Haters and the upcoming, controversial Dakota Fanning film, Hounddog. But she is perhaps better, if unjustly, known as the wife of Sean Penn and the mother of his two children, daughter Dylan, 15, and son Hopper, 13.

“No one really prepares you for motherhood,” says Wright Penn with typically appealing bluntness. “No one says to women, or men: ‘Guess what, guys? You are going to be non-existent for about eight years.’ They prepare you for pregnancy and that’s it. They don’t prepare you for marriage, either.” This titillating comment that Wright Penn declines to expand on (“Oh, you know…. Complicated…”) puts her in line with most women her age, struggling to manage marriage and motherhood, twin themes of Breaking and Entering.

For this film, director Anthony Minghella turns his attention from the exacting, hyper-literary period pieces he’s known for – The English Patient, Cold Mountain – to the evolving present-day neighborhood of King’s Cross in London. Wright Penn plays a Swedish mother named Liv whose devotion to her autistic child is all-consuming; she looks as if she hasn’t laughed in years. Her relationship with her longtime partner, Will (Jude Law), is dulled and open to intrusion, which arrives in the form of a Bosnian seamstress (Juliette Binoche) and her thief son. The two mothers, immigrants eyeing each other across a class divide, are willing to go to unhealthy lengths to protect their children. Wright Penn plays that devotion with a stretched-elastic anxiety. It’s a scary portrait of maternal depression.

“I think that’s the true cliché of being Swedish,” says Wright Penn. “I went to Sweden and spoke to people there, and totally unsolicited, they would offer: ‘We’re very depressed here because the light doesn’t shine very much.’ So [Liv] is born into depression, and now she’s got an autistic child and she’s wrapped in that bubble. There’s no time alone, no time for her man. It’s inherent in any mother: You will sacrifice all for your kid, but the kind of isolation it creates is what this movie is about – the emotional crime of that isolation.”

It is the kind of small, carefully crafted part that Wright Penn is known for. After an early career as a teen model and soap star in the ’80s and a breakout role in The Princess Bride, she seemed poised for America’s Sweetheart status. Instead, she married Penn – nobody’s sweetheart – left Hollywood and kept popping up as the standout in ensembles (White Oleander, A Home at the End of the World).

Jude Law (right) and Robin Wright Penn in a scene from the Anthony Minghella film Breaking and Entering. (Alliance Atlantis)

“If you don’t play the celebrity thing, then you don’t get offered the commercial movies,” she says with a shrug. Still, Wright Penn has turned down roles in multiplex films like Batman Forever, and she and her notoriously mercurial husband do dip their toes in commercial waters with equal parts wariness and success (he earned an Oscar for Mystic River two years ago; she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Forrest Gump). Though the family moved to northern California after Wright Penn and the kids were carjacked in Los Angeles in the mid-’90s, she doesn’t like the perception that she is “anti-Hollywood.”

“I’m working as much as I’d like to work, but I’d also like to see what’s out there. I see some of the big scripts, but most of those parts are offered to other people immediately because of box-office stuff. I’m sort of in that grey area: ‘Is she here? I don’t know what happened to her. Let’s cast this other person.’”

But staying out of the fray is a choice. Wright Penn takes only small roles during the school year to be available to her children, and says she can go virtually anywhere without being recognized. “If I’m with Sean, that’s a different story,” she laughs.

Wright Penn has watched the cultural obsession with celebrity grow to epic proportions over the course of her long career. Asked about the proliferation of celebrity magazines, she lets loose a mini-rant, swearing a blue streak and invoking the great, oppressive “They.”

“I think that stuff exists because they don’t want us to feel anymore. They don’t want us to have a pulse. Make everybody numb, give them fast food, and then we’ve got puppets. It’s like this government. Don’t think. Don’t question,” she says. “That’s what this f----g celebrity thing is, it’s crazy. How about something sacred? Do we know these people? Lindsay Lohan? Angelina and Brad? Are we in their f----g bedroom? No, we’re not. Do we hear their conversations? No, we don’t. It’s the most insidious thing in the world. [For actors,] it’s like being a prisoner. The only difference is someone in prison committed a crime. Where did we f--- up? We’re doing art. It’s bizarre.”

Then she laughs, and her face relaxes back into that familiar movie-star tableau. I wonder why, then, does anyone do this work anymore, submitting to such scrutiny?

“I love acting,” she says. “I’m loving it even more now because I’m not as worried. I used to be so scared. I’d hate what I do. You get older, you don’t have those concerns anymore. You actually start experiencing the good side of life the older you get. It’s getting better.”

As she puts out her final cigarette, and awaits the next uninformed journalist, she adds, “We’re all tortured in some way, actors. There’s something that needs to be exposed, and that exposure is a sharing. I’m kind of a shy person. I’m not bold, and it’s an outlet. Hopefully, I touch people and get them to relate to each other, because ultimately, that’s what we’re in this life for, to relate. Otherwise, we’re just whirling-dervish silliness.”

Breaking and Entering opens in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal on February 16.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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