Sunday, August 31, 1997By BRUCE KIRKLAND --

In the new movie She's So Lovely, Sean Penn plays a psychotic grifter who completely, desperately and utterly loves a loser femme played by his real wife, Robin Wright Penn.

Despite the anti-hero's bout of violence that leads to a 10-year stay in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, the two lovers stay in love. Forever and absolutely.

Which makes it impossible not to think of the tempestuous real-life romance between Penn and Wright (who, as of April 27, insists on Wright Penn as her official name and movie billing). They are the parents of two children, five-year-old Dylan and three-year-old Hopper, but little about their lives together has been `normal' family stuff. Penn once told me that Hopper was conceived on a surprise conjugal visit he paid to Wright when the two were severely separated, so much so Penn feared he might never even see her again much less become the father of a second child. They eventually reconciled and have just moved out of Los Angeles, where Wright and the kids were the victims of a 1996 car-jacking, to Marin County in northern California.

Now, like the star-crossed couple in She's So Lovely, which opened in Toronto this weekend after earning Penn the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, they are together forever. Intensely. Lovingly.

But all that is irrelevant to the movie, Penn insists. Audiences will not remember the gossip. "Not 10 years from now. That's when it matters. They'll forget all that stuff."

Penn likens it to how irrelevant it now is that he cast Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson together as a battling couple in The Crossing Guard, after they had ended a long-time and similarly stormy relationship. "It really came down to casting. I thought: Who's a better Nicholson bulls--- detector than her?

"I don't think in movie-making that you can bother yourself too much with that stuff, unless you're making a piece that's for its time only, which is what many movies are. If you're riding a trend, then you do have to be conscious of it. That's what you're doing, making something of the here and now."

Nothing Penn and Wright Penn are doing now seems of the moment or a trend flick. They're in for the long haul, whether it's a controversial yet timeless sicko romance such as She's So Lovely, or it's the film Wright Penn has entered in the Toronto International Film Festival.

Eric Dignam's independent drama Loved is coming, and Wright Penn with it. The story concerns a court case in which Wright Penn must testify about the abuse she received at the hands of an ex-boyfriend who is charged in another abuse case that led to a death. William Hurt plays the prosecutor. Sean Penn shows up in a cameo.

She's So Lovely was written by John Cassavetes and directed by his son, Nick Cassavetes, after his father died working on the project with Penn. At one point, Penn wanted to direct it himself, but financiers balked at his insistence on shooting in black-and-white. He acted in it instead, out of a sense of duty to pere Cassavetes.

Penn also appreciates what the film says about love. "A lot of people say it's about such sick love, unhealthy love. I challenge anybody to say they have a better relationship! Anybody! It doesn't get better! You might feel more peaceful but there isn't as much passion. You might be more healthy but you're dying in some other way."

When Penn first said that in front of his wife, the day before I interview them both, she laughed, she recalls later. "I started laughing hysterically: `You're so funny!' And he said: `I'm not kidding!' He got upset with me and asked: `Have you ever had a better relationship?' And I said: `God, I hope so, what a nightmare!' (She pauses.) We do!"

Wright Penn, like her husband, acknowledges the parallels of their life to She's So Lovely, but downplays them. She does like the tempestuous nature of love, however.

"In society, is it the healthiest relationship? No! But does it breed the most love? I think so. We're pretty sick and crazy but hopefully not `that' sick (as the couple in the film). Our love is so deep because it is so complicated. Maybe, if you have the other, (it's) boredom."

However, actually shooting She's So Lovely presented enormous challenges to Wright Penn, the waifish actress from Dallas who made her big-screen splash in the ethereal title role of The Princess Bride. Here she is in She's So Lovely with her ass shoved in the air, her legs akimbo, her pretty face smashed up for half the movie, eyes screaming pain.

"Shooting it you had to remove yourself from your rationale, your reality," she admits, "because you would find yourself asking questions and wincing. What? Why? You consciously had to remove yourself from that way of thinking because it would get in the way."

The role itself was a startling departure from her typecasting as the princess or even a period-piece beauty in a costume, such as her title role in Moll Flanders.

"Finally," Wright Penn exhales, before taking a long drag on her cigarette and blowing the smoke into the breeze (the interview takes place outside. She enjoys the freedom. Like her husband, she is a chain-smoker).

As Maureen in She's So Lovely, smoking is the least of her sins. Which was a joy to act, says Wright Penn. "Being just hideous! It's fun to be able to go full out."

In mainstream films, producers and directors refuse to let actresses look nasty or even normal. Scenes with facial contortions are often reshot to make the femmes more fatale. She always balks and remembers saying one time: "I had snot running out of my nose, so what? I was crying!"

No problem in She's So Lovely. She got to be unlovely. "It was such a hoot to just be able to go with this trailer park trash all the way. It was fun."

Working with her husband is a lot of the fun, especially on films such as The Crossing Guard, because he was directing, not acting. "He was very different when he was the director because that's his element. He's happiest there and he's so good because he's an actor. He's the best and he's so at ease. He knows exactly what he wants. He knows exactly how to get out of you what he needs. The trust level is huge because he has been there, he has done that, he knows what you are going through. So that is the easiest.

"And it's more inspiring to work with someone whom you love and respect because you want to show for him and you want to do your best."

For his part, Penn is in complete agreement. "I think, of the actresses I could work with now, I think she'd be the one I'd have the easiest time with, yes! It works pretty well."


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