Note: Needless to say, since the film was released, Sean Penn has been extravagantly exposed as Hollywood’s all-time greatest bitch for US military and corporate power. If you resisted the pressure to jab yourself multiple times with DARPA’s bioweapon, then Sean Penn thinks you deserve to die, and if you’re a criminal frontman for NATO’s proxy war on Russia, he’ll give you his Oscar. This regime douchebag is either the stupidest motherfucker on the planet or his control file is off the charts.

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?

Stir, September 2020