This Father’s Day, my thoughts turn to Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen. Father and son. So who’s the role model? And who’s the bigger badass?
It’s impossible to watch Badlands, Terence Malick’s 1973 film starring a young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacey as two lovers on the run amid a pile of dead bodies, without thinking of Sheen’s son, Charlie.
Of course, the son physically resembles his dad, who made Badlands when he was 32 but looked much younger. But it’s the role Martin Sheen plays — Kip, an image-obsessed sociopath with “the worst trigger finger” his girlfriend Holly has ever seen — that calls to mind the younger Sheen, the beleaguered, fired TV star, the one with a penchant for porn stars and illegal substances and shooting his mouth off in public.
Malick’s tale vibrates on many levels, making it a mesmerizing classic for the ages. With its poetic imagery, skilled voiceover narration (by Spacek) and subtle read on teenage ennui, it could have been made last week. And it kicks the crap out of Oliver Stone’s overblown, trying-hard take on the same story, Natural Born Killers (from the overblown, trying-hard script by young Quentin Tarantino).
Whereas Natural Born Killers panders to a youth audience eager for violence and MTV-driven visual stimulation, Badlands focuses on its characters, their starkness etched in the excellent performances by Sheen and Spacek. Who knew the older Sheen had such nervous energy, such edge? Sure, he was great in the later Apocalypse Now (not director Francis Coppola’s first choice as Captain Willard; that would have been Harvey Keitel). And surely, if Charlie Sheen had to compare himself with a character played by his father, he would prefer Willard — a man on a mission, against all logic and odds, but certain of his path.
The younger Sheen, whose personal battle with CBS led to his dismissal from the hit TV show Two and a Half Men, after a lively but puzzling round of media missives that made the actor seem like he was crazy or still on the pipe, took to the road shortly after for a live show called “The Torpedo of Truth Tour” that first drew derisive boos but, after some tinkering, regained some fans, including fellow “epic” tweeter Miley Cyrus. (They have so much in common, after all.)
Sure, Charlie would like to think of himself as Willard, the man on a mission to slay the ox-like Marlon Brando/Colonel Kurtz. But his public actions make him seem as wreckless and careless as his dad’s character Kip, a former garbage man (you didn’t think we’d forget Charlie also played a garbage man with brother Emilio Estevez in Men at Work, did you?) on a cross-country murder spree.
And note that Dad Sheen looks cool while doing it, every step of the way, with every squeeze of the trigger. Whether he’s bopping in a forest with Spacek to Love is Strange by Mickey & Sylvia, aping James Dean (who was meanwhile aping Jesus Christ in Giant), with a shotgun slung across his shoulders or just checking his hair in a rear-view mirror while a cop car closes in during a chase, Sheen nails the image-obsessed vacuity of youth and fame. Kip wants to be famous: he’s itching for it. He’s dying for it. He’s killing for it.
When they finally catch up with Kip, he surrenders and gladly poses for pictures for the cops and National Guard troops that hunted him down. He tosses souvenirs to the crowd: “Who wants this lighter? Who wants the comb? This pen…?” He’s loving every minute of infamy, fatalistic to the end, even as it leads to the gas chamber. In a strange way, you can’t help thinking of son Charlie as being addicted to the same level of notoriety, the media speculation, the buzz.
Meanwhile, Spacek’s Holly numbly narrates the downward spiral of this doomed duo — almost like the media itself, or us viewers, commenting on Charlie Sheen’s real-time car wreck of a career in stunned, almost bored, disbelief.
Like father, like son? Well, of course, father Martin is a staunch activist, a do-gooder liberal who’s played the US president, for God’s sake, on TV’s The West Wing. He may have been a method actor, but he was no method father. The younger Charlie, meanwhile, had a tendency to play characters still on the verge of growing up: wide-eyed young dudes like Bud Fox in Wall Street, or US marine Chris Taylor in Platoon. In a way, the actor himself was never forced to grow up: until recently he was still seen prancing around in man-child attire on Two and a Half Men, playing up his playboy image. It’s hard to imagine him ever digging in, pulling off the kind of difficult, truthful performances that his father Martin nailed in the ‘70s.
Yet Charlie Sheen, for all his faults, has a certain effortless charm. And he has done admirable fundraising work for AIDS and breast cancer charities (according to Wikipedia). His crazed public pronouncements about “winning!” may seem like sheer bravado, a cry for help, or whistling in the dark, but there’s no denying Charlie’s in a league of his own. Or perhaps a planet all his own.
The final scene of Badlands shows a shackled Kip sitting next to a sheriff in the back seat of a police cruiser. They’re heading to Texas, where Kip will soon face the electric chair. The sheriff has a brown Stetson on his lap; Kip, apparently unperturbed by his fate, asks the sheriff where he got it. The sheriff shakes his head in amazement. “Boy, you are quite the individual.”
Kip looks up and shrugs. “You think they’ll take that into consideration?”
It could just as easily be Charlie Sheen’s mantra.