Review: The Last Face

Roundly dismissed at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Sean Penn's latest directorial effort, The Last Face, is a plodding, cringingly earnest romantic drama that keeps digging a deeper hole for itself. Its inherent problem is already evident, painfully so, within the first seconds of its opening title card, which likens the civil war in Sudan to "the brutality of impossible love shared by a man...and a woman." If one can get past the nausea-inducing pomposity of those words, then one's tolerance level will be well-challenged by the ensuing 130 minutes.

The man and woman in question are Miguel and Wren, attractively embodied by Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron, whose tortured love affair spans a decade against atrocity-filled backdrops ranging from Monrovia to Sierra Leone. He is a rugged Spanish doctor working in field hospitals, as dedicated to saving lives as he is to flirting with fellow field workers. She is the daughter of a celebrated South African humanitarian, trying to prove her own worth as she takes on the running of his organisation, Medecins du Monde. "Before I met Miguel," she tells us in one of the film's mopey voiceovers, "I was just an idea I had, I didn't really exist."

Miguel is the first to see her and she blooms in the sunshine of his gaze. This already strikes a discordant note since Theron, much like Jolie whose character in the similarly themed Beyond Borders was made to be equivalently palpitating, has never been a tremulous and delicate flower. Her natural ferocity would have made her pairing with the leonine Bardem combustible. Instead, Penn saddles them with cutesy scenes like brushing their teeth together or gauzy lovemaking moments that undercut their intrinsically intriguing relationship.

Shall one even mention how ironic it is for Wren, who constantly believes herself invisible and, by extension, unworthy, to be seen when the truly ignored victims of these countries' civil wars serve as a notch more than window dressing for her character arc and her love affair with Miguel? To be fair, Penn and the film genuinely find their focus when showing the horrors of what these men, women and children go through. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd creates images so evocative and unflinching that one wonders if the story would have been better expressed as a silent film.

Unfortunately, The Last Face is what it is - terribly boring, full of good intentions that undermines its own message (to wit: another refugee worker noting, "They stripped her from her vagina to her anus...but she's here with me, dancing."), and actors doing their best to rise above the torpor. Penn, who usually elicits excellent and nuanced performances from his actors (Viggo Mortensen in The Indian Runner, Jack Nicholson in The Crossing Guard and The Pledge, Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild), certainly doesn't do right by either Theron or Bardem. The supporting cast - Jared Harris, Jean Reno and Blue is the Warmest Colour's Adèle Exarchopolous - fare far worse in criminally thankless roles.

The Last Face

Directed by: Sean Penn

Written by: Erin Dignam

Starring: Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Adèle Exarchopolous, Jared Harris, Jean Reno, Denise Newman