IN HIS PRIME

By RICHARD CORLISS

Eddie Quinn turns to his wife Maureen and warns her against trying to figure him out. "You can't understand my obscurity," he says, "unless you have infrared vision." Actually, Eddie, the flailing loser played by Sean Penn in the new lower-depths romance She's So Lovely, is as easy to read as the funny papers. He loves the mouthy Maureen (Penn's own wife Robin Wright Penn) and will do anything to keep her or get her back. Penn, though, is a more challenging read: Studs Lonigan, say, rewritten by Brando's tougher kid brother.

He is Hollywood's most frighteningly talented pug--Oliver Stone calls Penn "the ultimate anti-all- American Boy"--yet he relishes the role of father. "Family," he says, "makes me feel there's a reason I'm alive." The perennial wild child also plays disciplinarian to his and Wright's son and daughter. "Robin is there for the battles," he explains. "I come in during the war settlements. Then there's no negotiations; I'm basically the atom bomb."

Even before his 1985 marriage to Madonna (they divorced in 1989), Penn had a rep as a ferocious scrapper, a plague on all paparazzi, a reluctant and truculent interview subject. These days Penn, who turned 37 this week and who married Wright last year after a long, volatile, off-and-on relationship, replies thoughtfully to a reporter's probes. What about Hollywood's embrace of independent films? "I don't trust that any more than I trust a mother-in-law's love." Is he happy? "I'm not going to accuse myself of being happy; just saying that would put me in a bad mood. But I am feeling productive. I'm feeling my life, which I didn't always do, partly because I'd be drunk a lot. Now there's a lot of good things going on."

One more twist. What Penn really wants to do is direct--and he has, smartly and obstinately, with The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard. But from friendship, and to help bankroll his directorial dreams, Penn has made half a dozen films in the past year or so. Friendship with the late writer-director John Cassavetes led to She's So Lovely, directed by Cassavetes' son Nick, for which Penn won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. And because Penn once met Terrence Malick in a bar and told him, "Give me a dollar and point the way," he is now acting in The Thin Red Line, Malick's first film since the 1978 Days of Heaven. This fall Penn will topline in two other major movies, Stone's U-Turn and David (Seven) Fincher's The Game. The fellow who eyeballs the future and says, "I think rare will be the case where I'll act," is in danger of becoming an A-list movie star.

She's So Lovely is the tale of two souls who are "mentally and emotionally retarded," Nick Cassavetes says. "They have one talent: they can love each other really good." Eddie, a small-time punk, is away when the pregnant Maureen is assaulted by a neighbor. Driven nuts by the news of her beating, he shoots a paramedic and is hospitalized for 10 years. In the interim, Maureen has married Joey (John Travolta), but that doesn't matter to Eddie when he gets out. He just wants his honey back.

A simple story spanning decades: that could also describe the making of She's So Lovely. John Cassavetes, the actor (Rosemary's Baby) and director revered for his gritty parables of lost love, wrote the script in the late '70s as a vehicle for himself and his wife Gena Rowlands. Just before he died in 1989, he rewrote the script for Penn. Later Penn planned to direct it, in black and white. Then Nick Cassavetes signed on. Consider the symmetry: a Cassavetes directing a beautiful blond with serious acting chops (not Rowlands but Wright) and her gifted, "difficult" actor-director husband (not John but Sean).

The coup was getting Travolta, who typically receives more as a star ($20 million) than this film cost ($18 million). He jumped at the chance. "To me," he says, "Joey was a tribute to all the male characters in Cassavetes films. I was Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and [Cassavetes] all wrapped into one." The role did offer Travolta a snappy showcase. "John is a sure shot for a Best Supporting Actor," says Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, the film's distributor. "I'll resign my Academy membership if he doesn't get nominated."

John Cassavetes' filmmaking obsession was contagious, at least within his family. "My bedroom was his editing room," Nick says. "I would wake up in the middle of the night and find a piece of film in my bed that showed my mother scratching her nose." Nick's directing strategy is like Dad's: "It's to put actors into a situation, talk to them about what you feel until they're ready to scream, then turn on the camera." Nick was especially effective in guiding the scene in which Maureen is raped. Harrowing work, says Wright: "You rip your soul apart and lay it on the table. Then you go home and be a mom."

After filming ended, the struggle continued. Penn declined to shoot extra scenes, apparently fiddled with the director's cut and put different music on the sound track. "Here's Sean's method of negotiating," observes Weinstein. "He says, 'My way.' He can be a rascal, but then who isn't?" Even for a kinder, gentler Penn, what he refers to as "the law of the self" still applies.

The wrangling hasn't stopped yet. Hachette Premiere & Cie, the film's French producer, last week attempted to stop the U.S. opening, charging Miramax with not paying its $8 million advance for international rights. Miramax says it will send the check when Hachette provides music licenses for songs used in the film. "They just have to do their paperwork," says Weinstein. "The dispute will be easily resolved with no animosity."

Sounds like a Cassavetes film: arguing is just love with the volume turned up. And love, to John Cassavetes, was all he knew, and all he wanted to put in his films. "Where and how can I love?" he asked in 1984. "Can I be in love, in that I can live with some degree of peace?"

Penn is wary of trying to define love. "It's a simple, pure thing that's been made unsimple by philosophies," he says." I think you have to trust love on its own, and not make the way it manifests itself redefine what the love was. That's what makes people crazy. Love is a wild animal that you try to control--but you have to feel it first. If you're looking for evidence of it, you're not a lover, you're a cop."

It doesn't take infrared vision to see his philosophy: in art and life, love is a battle. So watch out, moguls and directors, critics and moviegoers. Sean Penn will never give up the fight.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles