VIFF review: Citizen Penn raises questions of pain, power, and poverty in Haiti
Sean Penn rolls up his sleeves after the devastating 2010 earthquake
Sean Penn in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake - still from Citizen Penn
Streams September 24 to October 7 as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, via VIFF.org
DON HARDY DIRECTED this dispatch from upside-down world, where people like Sean Penn, Bono, and Anderson Cooper roll up their sleeves and ask their millionaire friends to match funds with the World Bank in an effort to “save” Haiti.
It’s a white whale for Penn, who arrived in the region with his nonprofit J/P Haitian Relief Organization (later renamed CORE) following the earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. The actor insisted at the time on downplaying his presence, but here’s a whole documentary about it anyway.
Interviewed at length and giving it the full Marlboro Man-of-compassion rap, Penn illustrates that sincerity, drive, and charisma can all comfortably live alongside hopeless naivety.
In fairness, the org achieved much during its time in Haiti. Lives were saved and some conditions were improved, generally thanks to Penn getting on the phone and making the impossible happen. Considerably less impressive is Penn’s effective excusing of the power structure that exports poverty as a matter of policy—colonialism by any other name—which is why, in his work for the charity-triage wing of the neoliberal pain and suffering complex, Penn can assert with a straight face that “the U.S. military is the greatest aid organization in the world.” Seriously, man?
The vital difference is that Magnus’s film has compassion for its characters. It takes no relish in their experience of true malevolence.
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