In Which We Become Brad Pitt At Great Cost

It's All Very Real

by DICK CHENEY

Allied
dir. Robert Zemeckis
124 minutes

It is an important human tradition that all great couples begin to resemble one another. Brad Pitt's eyes have slowly been rendered heavy-liddled; his skin hardening into a flat, slightly leathery carapace. The moment he sees Marion Cotillard he is mainly shocked that a person could look any different. "Now this is the part where I tell you I love you," she whispers to Pitt on a rooftop. The Canadian intelligence officer (these apparently exist) whose role Pitt inhabits in Allied is quite deliberate and cautious, but he has to be. If he perishes in Casablanca, Canada's contribution to the Second World War will be vanquished as well.

Just kidding, Canada, and I'm sorry that Trailer Park Boys became so awful, and thus your only contribution to civilization besides allowing a lot of television shows to be shot in Vancouver is now impotent. Even more sadly, Pitt never even attempts a Québécois accent. Pitt does speak a bit of French in Allied, and it never really makes too much sense that most of the characters speak English: switching back and forth only reminds us how inauthentic it all is.

The rumor, of course, was that Pitt cheated on his wife with Cotillard. Watching Allied you can be fairly certain that this was never the case. At one point Pitt kisses her on the forehead like a sweet friend that you maybe stick your penis into one night after work and then every time you see each other after that it's a little awkward, but the memory is hardly painful.

You never fucked a friend? Good. He never lets you forget it.

Allied was something far short of a box office smash. In fact it lost a substantial amount of money after you factor in the considerable marketing budget. Sometimes a movie will thrive on gossip, but no one really wanted to see these two older people in coitus, especially considering that we will never stop thinking about Brad yelling at his adopted children on their private plane.

Any movie about the past must tell us something about the present. The view of Nazism here is revoltingly casual; the war itself is a mere incidental background. The massacre of millions is nothing in light of the importance of the key romance here; despite that Pitt and Cotillard mostly seem exceedingly frosty to one another. The chemistry is not there at all, and director Robert Zemeckis (The Walk) is out of his depth trying to create it. Cotillard does have the capability of projecting an eminent sexuality, but Allied buttons her up way too much: she is at her most appealing when she is in the corner of the frame nowhere near the center, so elusive she might totally disappear if the wrong word is spoken, or the penis inserted in an unwelcome orifice.

What surrounds this misstep is no less dull. A period piece demands a certain sweeping music, and the score to Allied, by Alan Silvestri, comes across as more or less inchoate. The tone remains entirely off as Zemeckis vacillates between painfully bad scenes where the two senior citizens flirt with one another to supposedly tense moments while Pitt searches for a German official. The set design of Casablanca itself is a total mess — you never get any moment of foreignness, and there is absolutely no surprise here at all: Allied feels more like a Marlon Wayans-led satire of Lawrence of Arabia.

Cotillard gives birth in a somehwat unlikely scene with bombs falling in the background. Somehow Pitt has great personal wealth and the two settle down in England. Marion turns much softer then, and when Pitt wakes up next to her we understand how thrilling it is to have someone there for you, that you can touch at any time and who will touch you.

Marion makes a lot more sense as a dull English wife than a spy, but soon Pitt finds out she is probably working for the Germans and doesn't feel as attracted to her. Compounding the issue is that Marion never undresses for the sex scenes in Allied: the two consummate their marriage in this weird, fetishy, fully clothed wintercourse.

Neither of them feel very attached to the child, perhaps sensing on some level that it was the result of a faux union. The two relentlessly try to recreate their time in Morrocco, but it simply does not feel particularly right. Probably Marion would have just told her husband the truth in real life, but in this story she stays quiet even though Brad is super placid in this role, never once exploding in anger — just showing off some mild Canadian distaste.

It is ironic that the basic plot of Allied is that Brad suspects his wife, when he is actually the suspicious one. Why did Angelina dump this piece of garbage? The terms of the temporary custody agreement allowing Pitt access to his children are quite revealing: not only is he sentenced to a weekly therapy session with Los Angeles-based marriage counselor Ian Russ, he has to go with Angelina. This breakup, then, is in name only. He can never stop looking at her face, primarily because it is his own.

Brad also has to submit to drug and alcohol testing four times a month, which either should have gotten his lawyer fired, or is the measured consequence of the intense diet of cocaine, weed, and alcohol he samples in pursuit of a finer performance in his chosen profession. In Allied, the resulting exhibition is quite the tragic mess. Once we tire of the awkward interaction between the leads, Zemeckis introduces some peripheral characters to testify about the allegiance of Cotillard — one is a pained, squawking Lizzy Caplan who seems totally out of place in this retinue. God this was bad. Please don't see it. They probably should not have ever made a movie which required you to feel sympathy for Brad Pitt.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Our Surname Will Be Jolie Pitt For All Time

On the Radio

by LAUREN RO

By the Sea
dir. Angelina Jolie Pitt
122 minutes

There is something destabilizing and even harrowing about witnessing a couple’s affection for one another when their language looks a lot different than yours. Trying to understand what they have (and in turn what you and yours don’t have) can become an obsession. So you observe them, their every saccharine gesture an affront to your own relationship, which seems loveless by comparison. You begin to see cracks that were never there in the first place; you pick fights with your partner who cannot even begin to fathom what has gotten into you. In short, you sabotage yourself. But really, it’s more complicated than that. What you’re doing is pushing at the limits of your shared love. To see if it will hold up to the crazy.

Which is exactly what Angelina Jolie Pitt’s character does in By the Sea, the film that she wrote, directed, and produced. In the film Angelina and her husband Brad play married couple Vanessa and Roland Bertrand, a former dancer and blocked writer, respectively. They shack up at a seaside resort in the South of France so that Roland can work on his book—and, ostensibly, so that the two of them can work on their marriage.

It’s the ’70s, which we know because Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg are on the radio — spewing their own brand of post-marital bliss (they never married) — and pussy bow blouses are the fashion of the day, but it hardly matters. The era functions as a symbol, its muted colors a reflection of the suppressed emotions waiting to erupt. That catharsis takes its time to arrive, and when the anticipated moment finally does, it’s a little anticlimactic.

Instead of writing, Roland boozes all day at the local bar, and Vanessa, paralyzed by an as-yet unnamed grief, lounges around the hotel room, popping pills and weeping mascara-tinged tears. The two are simply too self-pitying to stir up any drama, though Vanessa tries, by accusing Roland of wanting to fuck the pretty blonde that has moved in next door with her husband. He doesn’t take the bait. One day, he comes home early to discover Vanessa crouched on the floor, peeping through a hole in the wall leading into their neighbors’ room.

Vanessa has become obsessed with spying on the young, insatiable newlyweds since happening upon the portal a few days earlier. It’s the only thing that’ll get her out of bed — and now that she has no choice but to share her secret, into bed with Roland. Spying becomes a couple-building exercise, jumpstarting the healing process of their unhappy marriage — until, inevitably, their little game goes too far.

You watch By the Sea in the same way that Vanessa spies on the couple, looking for clues for — what exactly? It’s impossible to separate Angelina and Brad the in-real-life married couple from Vanessa and Roland the characters they play, and Jolie Pitt practically begs you to draw your own conclusions about the state of their marriage. And even if that is not on full display, her body is. Here are my orb-like eyes, done up in falsies and a thick cat-eye, the better for you to peer into, she seems to be saying. And here, my near-grotesque mouth: what would you like it to tell you? But most of all, it is her breasts, still beautiful, that throw you for the biggest loop.

By baring them on film she reminds you of her decision to have a preventative double mastectomy (and subsequent reconstruction) when she learned that had an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer, a disease that killed her mother. Look who’s in control, she is saying.

At times, however, you wish she’d just lose it. Jolie Pitt has said in interviews that she made the film as a way to work through the grief of losing her mother. And that she would not have been able to make the film if she and Brad had problems remotely similar to the ones in the story.

In a way, then, By the Sea is a fantasy version of how a relationship implodes. They don’t go batshit crazy like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (who were married at the time) do in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that’s kind of the point. Jolie Pitt wields control as director, but so does Vanessa. For all her theatrics (which aren’t all that theatrical), she’s the one running the show. Roland has his faults, but he’s patient and kind and gives her space (even sets her sunglasses right-side up so that they won’t get scratched). It’s precisely because of this safety net that she is able to push at the boundaries of their marriage. Even in the moment of crisis, you see that she doesn’t mean to hurt Roland, and he knows it. She only means to hurt herself.

What happens when you let an outsider meddle? Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise were the most famous couple in Hollywood when they shot Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut over 15 grueling months between 1996 and 1998. They played their marriage for art and were at the mercy of Kubrick, who was demanding and famously secretive, even preventing the two leads from comparing notes. There’s no denying that he was manipulative: there was no safe word with Kubrick, and everyone knows how that marriage ended.

Production for By the Sea was, on the other hand, a literal honeymoon, shot while the couple was on their actual honeymoon, right after their real-life wedding. Jolie Pitt goes easy on the two of them. There are scenes you wish would go over the edge; instead they teeter on the precipice of a full blow-out. It’s love and respect that holds them back. And if they were ever too close to the edge, all the director had to do was call “Cut!” forcing you to confront the questions: What is marriage? What is art?

Lauren Ro is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is her first appearance in these pages.

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In Which We Hold The Tree Of Life At An Arm's Length

One Big, One Small

by JESSE KLEIN

The Tree of Life
dir. Terrence Malick
138 minutes

It is impossible to watch Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life without having an opinion. Some will find this year’s winner of the Palme D’Or a towering achievement, nothing short of a landmark in American filmmaking. Others will be underwhelmed, will roll their eyes at its sheer exuberance, scoff at the project's attempt to depict an American post-World War II consciousness alongside the birth and evolution of the universe in under two and a half hours.

Weeks before its national release, The Tree of Life has already been lauded, called a "prayer" by Roger Ebert and drawn comparisons to Melville’s Moby-Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from A.O. Scott. Though the film does contain images and sequences as broad in scope as can be imagined, its core lies in individual, fragmented childhood memories, likely those of Malick himself, growing up in suburban Texas in the 1950s. Memory and how the brain remembers and how it recounts to itself is the thread through The Tree of Life, and the juxtaposition of a post-war pre-adolescence with the birth of the universe is nearly oracular, and so, easy to criticize in its largesse. But The Tree of Life transcends criticism, even opinion. It just is. It does not entertain or explain; that is not the film's purpose. This does not make it better than others, or suggest it has necessarily achieved a level of greatness. Malick uses the film medium to show existence, in all its completeness, albeit from an individual perspective. And he does so through the refracted prism of memory.

The film begins and is defined by a loss, the loss, one we experience with Mrs. O’Brien, played by the relatively unknown (and soon to very well-known) Jessica Chastain. One day a man arrives with a telegram, a telegram that informs her of her son R.L.'s death at nineteen. We don’t know how or why he died, though the implication is that he perished during wartime. She calls her husband Mr. O’Brien, played by Brad Pitt, and then the two are, together and alone, stranded in never-ending grief.

The other person forever ruined by this is the eldest son. Jack is played by Sean Penn as an adult and non-actor Hunter McCracken as a boy. Jack is the film’s ballast, the lens through which we experience this world. McCracken as Young Jack is an absolute wonder, a relic of the 50s, his wide nose and mouth challenged by his all-seeing green eyes, made light of by his big ears. McCracken’s sage facial expression, intently watching but seething with pre-adolescent passions, explains everything, somehow universalizing his experience with a glance.

After news of the middle child R.L.’s death, Malick takes us back to the beginning, showing us the Big Bang in all its godly mystery. Some will find this section of the film trying; it offers no connection, no narrative pull, it is simply a visual telling of the birth of the universe. Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey aside, this section astounds because of its sheer beauty. It does not mean anything, it doesn’t stand in for anything else, it just is. When later we see a CGI dinosaur spare the life of its prey, we are tempted to draw parallels with the brothers, with the Darwinian nature of late childhood and early adolescence. But perhaps this is just another moment Malick chooses to show in the world’s evolution, like the jellyfish sauntering toward the water’s surface. And this evolution, this story of births and rebirths culminates with Jack O’Brien’s entrance into the world.

Jack’s infant life is told in isolated moments and details: two pairs of feet, one big one small, dragging across green grass, the look from afar of a crib, your crib, covered in an afternoon sun. These kinds of images are past clichéd, and yet, Malick reinvents them in their utter simplicity — one of the remarkable things about The Tree of Life is that it is a film made in 2011 devoid of irony and cynicism. We see Jack grow quickly, with music soaring through it all, pushing one image over the last. Nearly the entire film has music in it, and so there are not set pieces, distinct scenes and montages, but rather, the whole film is a montage, in the sense that it is an interlude told visually with music as backdrop. But, in this case, the interlude is eternity.

Malick slows his rhythm and settles into the O’Brien’s life, now with three boys, Jack, R.L. and the amorphous Steve, the youngest, who seems to exist if only as a witness, as proof that the other family members are really there, not merely dreams themselves. The events we see for the next ninety or so minutes belong to Jack. They are not dreams, they contain order and meaning, there is none of the randomness or hidden meanings of dreams. Rather, they are memories. Even when Jack is not present, we feel his gaze taking in the scene, experience his need for autonomy, for selfhood, and how that battles his need to be governed and loved by his parents. Indeed, the editing can feel random, overly frenetic at times, but it’s just Jack, sifting through time, remembering the tips of his mother’s arms in the sun, the length of chord between two telephone cans, the white hairs shining on his baby brother’s head, while he stands, inches away.

In a film told through the extraordinary cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, it is the editing that defines it. There is no coverage, no shot reverse shot, no method other than following a mind that recalls, that seeks. In that way The Tree of Life is a stream of consciousness work, a film that conjures Joyce or Woolf, rather than Whitman or Melville. The succession of images is what Jack, adult and child, is thinking, feeling. We feel his confused relationship with his father, and so we too feel conflicted about him.

Pitt as Mr. O’Brien is almost boorish, and almost brilliant. He is overbearing but does so with the best of intentions; he wants his kids to be better than he is. When, at around the midway point, Jack sees his father lying under his car fixing it in the driveway, he contemplates kicking the carjack away, crushing him instantly. There are a number of these moments in the film, where Jack realizes his own impulses, his own humanness, sees that he is capable of thinking things that are not nice about people he loves.

His relation with his mother is equally complex and charged. It is Jack and the Mother, and not the father, who speak in a whisper, not so much as voiceover narration, but incantations, talking to God, or R.L., or themselves. The Mother tells her sons that there are two ways through life, nature and grace. She admits the virtues of both but suggests grace as the path to follow. Indeed, Jack’s problem with his mother lies in her stoic passivity. As he grows more frustrated, he accuses her of not standing up to her husband, of not being strong enough. Chastain as Mrs. O’Brien is fleeting, almost translucent: beautiful and loving though forced into emotional absentia. These altercations with his parents confuse him and force him to rebel, from his parents’ stronghold, though mostly from himself.

In one scene, Jack stands in the living room holding a lamp toward his brother who holds a coat hanger an arm’s length away. R.L. is fair-haired, has a lightness to him, but here he stands with trepidation looking not at the open socket but into his brother’s eyes, looking for safety, affirmation. McCracken gives nothing away, not the sense of false safety, nor that of brotherly love — he wants R.L. to make this decision for himself. "I trust you." R.L. says. And slowly, really slowly, brings the hanger to the socket and with a quick thrust of his arm, puts it in. Nothing happens. It is not shown, but it probably was not plugged in at all. R.L. has a softness that Jack doesn’t have, can’t have as the eldest, the one closest to their father and his harsh affections. It is R.L. who shares his father’s passion for music, something Jack notices all too often. As the eldest, it is Jack who must experience everything first, what feels in the film like the first time ever.

As Jack sits on the front lawn, a lawn that feels expansive in play, tortuous in work, he sees a neighbor, a beautiful unknown neighbor, come and go. One day, when he sees this neighbor leave the house he sneaks in. Though it feels like he is already lost, this all being so new, he goes straight for her bedroom, for her drawers. He looks through the jewelry, through the dresses, things that have only had meaning until now in relation to his mother. He pulls out one dress, then puts it back. Finally, he takes out a slip or nightgown and lays it on the bed. In what feels like less than a second, there is a quick shot of him standing over the dress and then suddenly he is outside, in a forest, holding the dress as if it’s evidence that must be disposed of. (The implication is of his first experience with masturbation.)

He looks around frantically, throws the dress under some plywood but then soon picks it up. He sees the flowing creek and quickly throws the dress into it. He almost immediately understands the permanence of the act: he can’t clean it and put it back, there it goes. Cowed and confused, Jack returns home to see his mother waiting, arms crossed in the summer dusk. But, now, it’s not just his mother but a woman, a woman that someone might think about the way he thought about his neighbor. Jack can do nothing but walk with head bowed into his father’s house.

Moments like these populate Jack’s struggle, his inner conflict of love and resentment toward his parents, especially his father. As an adult, we see a successful Jack, presumably an architect, in a high-rise office. But in the office we do not see him making decisions or excelling but rather wandering around aimlessly, looking at people and things as if they’re everything but what they should be, need to be, his brother. On an elevator that seems to never end, he speaks on the phone to his father, a now elderly and more passive Mr. O’Brien, apologizing "for what he said." We don’t know what that is, but we do know that he still battles his father, and that he loves him.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Austin. He last wrote in these pages about the archives of David Foster Wallace. He twitters here.

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