There’s this perception that if an actor portrays a real life figure that they’re pretty much guaranteed to garner awards so long as they don’t screw it up royally. I think it’s becoming more and more apparent that this is not necessarily the case. There have been so many instances of actors nailing real historical people who exist in the realm of audio and video archives that it’s not much of a novelty anymore; actors need to bring something extra, tap into a certain truth or depth of a character, making them movie real in addition to reality real. That is, fleshing them out so that they seem real as opposed to leaving them as two-dimensional news footage figures.
This is why Sean Penn won over critics and audiences alike for his work in Milk. The assumption from everyone who had seen The Wrestler was that Mickey Rourke had given the performance of the year in that movie by Darren Aronofsky. And then Milk came out, and Sean Penn gave the performance of his career. We see him again completely become Harvey Milk, and transform every detail of his movement to that of this unique figure. He dictates the emotion of each scene with power and grace, from the intimate moments to the massive speeches. The fact that he was playing such a heroic figure helped, but Penn was able to capture someone who had many dimensions, some less admirable than others, and still harness precisely what made him such a transformative figure all the same.
This is but a sample of Sean Penn’s work—probably the cream of the crop, granted, but he has so many smaller roles that he’s made more out of than perhaps was expected of them. There’s a certain element of risk to each role he takes on as well that tends to be particularly thrilling. They could very easily go bad, but very few of them do. Among his generation of actors, there can’t be any doubt that he belongs at the top end of the list, can there? As far as I’m concerned, he can be as serious as he damn well pleases.