It’s Really a Good Factor That Sean Penn Made a Documentary About Ukraine

It might be very straightforward to poke enjoyable at Sean Penn for making a documentary concerning the warfare in Ukraine: one other saga of the wealthy and coddled film star, daring—or deigning—to drop right into a hazard zone, bear witness, determine with the heroes, and fly again dwelling unscathed.

At a number of factors on this movie, Penn acknowledges the chance of mockery in his self-deprecating patter. “Who do you assume you might be—Walter Cronkite?” he mimics a hypothetical critic. “Do you might have a savior complicated?” He pauses and says quietly, virtually with a shrug, “I’m curious … And generally I really feel I will be useful.”

It’s on this spirit that Penn’s movie—Superpower, now streaming on Paramount+—is price approaching. If in case you have been following the information from Ukraine even a bit, you’ll be taught nothing new right here. Even Penn’s three interviews with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky—one in every of them occurring simply hours after Russian troops invaded—present no insights you haven’t gleaned elsewhere prior to now two years. This previous February, in a press convention on the Berlin Worldwide Movie Pageant, the place the movie premiered, Penn known as his movie “the Fool’s Information” to the warfare.

Penn and his co-director, Aaron Kaufman, first deliberate the undertaking as one thing very totally different—a profile of Zelensky, a “whimsical story,” as Penn places it, of a comic book actor who performed an unlikely Ukrainian president on a well-liked TV present after which, in 2019, really turns into an unlikely Ukrainian president. By the point Penn and his group make their first journey to Ukraine, in November 2021, Russian troops are mounting on the border. By the tip of their first actual week of filming, the next February, the invasion has begun. Penn decides to remain—“I’m not ready to depart tomorrow,” he tells his safety chief, who urges him to just do that—and over the subsequent yr, comes again a number of instances extra.

For his first interview with Zelensky, simply hours earlier than the invasion, Penn decides not to usher in cameras, saying it’s so the president can dimension him up with out stress. That is comprehensible however puzzling. Zelensky has little question sized Penn up, as an actor viewing a fellow actor, already, and he’ll clearly need the interview for the publicity it could possibly carry his battle. Greater than that, Penn’s politeness seems to be a cinematic—and historic—mistake.

Penn and his crew come again with cameras later that evening—the invasion is now on, and Zelensky is in a bunker—and he notices a change. “It’s so loopy,” Penn says to one in every of his group members after the filmed interview. “We met this charming younger president in a swimsuit this afternoon. Rapidly, he’s a wartime president.” He observes of Zelensky’s demeanor, “You had been simply trying into the eyes of braveness.” In a later interview with Zelensky, greater than a yr into the warfare, Penn remembers, “I noticed a change in you” between the afternoon and nighttime conferences—“such as you had been born for this second … a second of utmost historical past.” Zelensky nods in settlement.

It might have been good—it may need been revelatory—to witness this modification for ourselves: to see the distinction between Zelensky’s remaining moments as an odd particular person and his first moments as a nationwide hero and a world chief.

In different elements of the movie, Penn talks with a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, a gaggle of Ukrainian journalists (a few of whom have doubts about Zelensky’s readiness simply earlier than the invasion however hail him as “fucking nice” a yr later), and some victims of Russian assaults (we see their blown-up residences, the wreckage of their cities), and he takes a fast journey to the entrance traces. This final sequence raises questions within the viewer’s thoughts (or at the least in mine): Penn could have seen it as an obligation, maybe a check of whether or not he may make the identical transition from actor to one thing bigger if given an opportunity, however one wonders if the journey was vital. One in all his escorts, a lady, says, “Can I be very blunt? You’re Sean Penn, no person’s going to be accountable for your dying on the entrance traces.” In different phrases, he wasn’t allowed to face a lot danger, however his escorts had been diverted from different, probably extra pressing duties.

Then once more, perhaps escorting Sean Penn and his digicam crew was crucial factor they might have been doing on the time. The West hadn’t but stepped up its army help, which the Ukrainian military desperately wanted. Penn’s presence—a film star backing the Ukrainian trigger—may have been correctly calculated as price numerous time and hassle.

Penn is aware of this. Upon returning to the states, he goes on Fox, MSNBC, Russian TV—he speaks in every single place he can—lauding Zelensky as a “man with intelligence, love, and braveness” who stands because the face of the equally brave Ukrainian folks.

That is an avowedly propagandistic movie, a valentine to Volodymyr Zelensky, an unapologetic declaration of a film star’s proper and privilege to make use of his fame and riches to tout a political place. It’s a film primarily about Sean Penn—although it’s Sean Penn as a viewer’s surrogate, coming to Ukraine as an harmless, seeing horrible issues, assembly an awesomely admirable chief (who began out as somebody like himself), and adopting a trigger. Some could poke enjoyable, however Penn appears honest and deeply moved, so what’s incorrect with doing what he’s accomplished?

If you wish to watch a movie that grippingly captures the horrors and bravado of Ukrainians at warfare, take a look at PBS Frontline’s 20 Days in Mariupol. If you wish to grasp the roots of the Ukrainian folks’s revived starvation for freedom and independence (and see riveting filmmaking as properly), watch Winter on Fireplace, Evgeny Afineevsky’s Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary concerning the 2014 Maidan protests that ousted the pro-Moscow authorities and set the stage for a brand new politician equivalent to Zelensky and the potential of resistance to Russia’s invasion. And if you wish to perceive the beliefs of Europe, which impressed the Ukrainian protesters and which at the moment are in jeopardy throughout the continent and right here within the U.S., learn Timothy Garton Ash’s good chronicle Homelands: A Private Historical past of Europe.

In the meantime, Sean Penn has set down an admirable doc of his personal explorations. It’s good that it exists.