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 We Simply Cannot Sit Through Another Macbeth

The Sad Boy

by DICK CHENEY

Macbeth
dir. Justin Kurzel
119 minutes

I have never liked Macbeth. It is easily the most patronizing of Shakespeare's plays and watching Michael Fassbender holding Marion Cotillard in his arms, gripping her like a wriggling golden retriever does little to alter my conviction.

I remember when I was a kid I explained to my fifth grade teacher that Macbeth was whipped. She highlighted this term and made me understand why it was so offensive, since it was a word that intimated a man controlling a woman was some kind of beastly slavery. She was controlling me in much the same fashion, so I substituted a synonym, or as I prefer to call it, a cinnamon. I will never forget her armpits; she never shaved them and it was very brave. Director Justin Kurzel attempts to dispense with the sexist undertones of his source material, but that is impossible and Macbeth becomes only duller for his impotent attempt.

Weirdly, Marion Cotillard uglies herself up quite a bit for Lady Macbeth. She barely ever leaves the dark rooms where she encourages her husband's misdeeds. Once she meets up with Duncan and she looks like a depressed housewife; not the wife of the Thane of Cawdor. Lady Macbeth, by all rights, should be glorious. But she is not, a fault blamed on the play's writer and the director of this year's Macbeth, who seems to think he is making some kind of Scottish horror movie.

Murder is substantially worse than Kurzel makes it out to be. As he slays Duncan, Fassbender has this very exacting look, like he is popping an extremely painful pimple. He looks good after the murder; he even seems to enjoy it on some level. Afterwards and before, the Scottish highlands resemble lesions on the face of the earth.

Even when Macbeth starts in on killing kids, we never see it, just the fire afterwards burning their corpses and the intonation of sad music. Was the point here to exclude the most interesting, painful parts of the story so that Fassbender could tawk more?

Even the theatrical Macbeth can only be saved by shifting the focus to the play's heroes. Malcolm (Jack Reynor) is a simpering man-child who weeps when Fassbender throatily informs him of his father's passing. Paddy Considine is utterly wasted in the shit role of Banquo, and he fades into the background as Fassbender overwhelms him by talking louder and more often. Sean Harris is a subtle and possessed actor who invests the key role of Macduff with a shrill vulnerability, but Kurzel and his tired author give Macbeth's mirror image little in the way of meaningful screen time. Even his grief is boilerplate: he retches.

The key scene in Macbeth is when the titular character goes mad at this big dinner in front of everyone. This is usually played partly for laughs and then it turns more serious. Since Kurzel's Macbeth is not the slightest bit humorous for any reason — it is maybe the most self-serious rendition of the tale ever perpetrated — we feel neither embarrassed nor amused.

Kurzel cuts as much of Macbeth's dialogue as he dares, the only means of turning the action into a compelling drama instead of an extended meditation on death. Avoiding the latter is difficult, because Macbeth has Fassbender intone some of his longer speeches into voiceover. All the mystery is lost in Macbeth by the end of the second act; we know everything there is to know, so the only means of keeping the audience's attention is to (1) show Fassbender shirtless and (2) wait for Marion Cotillard to do the same in vain. Everyone is ghosts at this point.

As the play spirals toward the inevitable, just before Lady Macbeth is about to take her own life for reasons unknown, Marion is actually looking a lot better. A lot of directors have trouble making sense of Cotillard's beauty, and her raw, throaty sexuality before death is the best part of Kurzel's Macbeth. It is the only time we are listening because we care, not because the diegesis is begging for any attention at all.

I don't know if Shakespeare is holding up all that much lately. His political commentary seems super dated; even twenty years ago it seemed significantly more relevant. A few of his comedies are funny, but most of them are weird jokes with sexual entendres that barely made sense even at the time. Besides Hamlet, you may want to be spared the trouble when this time could be repurposed towards getting into crossfit.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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