By the Sea – written and directed by Angelina Jolie. Drama. 122 minutes Color 2015.
★★★★
The Story: A well-to-do married couple travel through the Mediterranean seeking to reestablish their marriage.
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Once again, this is a case of a director mistakenly directing her own screenplay. What’s mistaken about it, in this case, is that her own part is miswritten and underwritten.
Underwritten in that the author supposes content to be present by inference, which is to say that because the marriage is in difficulty we must empathize with a situation just because it is there.
Miswritten in that she has written the part she plays as a woman made vulnerable by a mental disturbance. Mental disorders do not inspire pity in an audience. They inspire in an audience an exit from the site of the impossible-to-deal-with.
There is also here an imbalance in the playing forced unto being that Jolie’s husband, Brad Pitt, is a more talented actor than she is.
She also makes the mistake of having her eyes arrayed in opera makeup throughout the piece. It turns her into a power-beauty like Laura Croft and so many of her other roles and at which she is superb. But it makes no sense here, save to put the actor in a separate category from Brad Pitt, who seems to wear no makeup at all, save that he has died his hair darker than it is, whatever it is – for Pitt is 13 years older than she, into his 50s. Not that that matters much, for from the start of his career he has always registered 10 years younger than his actual age.
As to Jolie, we cannot take into our hearts a performance which takes refuge in the fast food joint of insanity. We are expected to feel pity; instead we feel pathos – pathos is pity made in Japan. At any rate, from the point of view of an actor’s choices, it’s a cop-out. She doesn’t have the resources to bring it off.
Perhaps what Jolie intended was to create a bread-and-butter note to Pitt, for all he has to put up with in being married to her. Her ruthless maternity, her vast income, and her radical physical problems.
And Pitt is cast as just the sort of husband he would be in real life. His character is patient, loving, kind, communicative. He takes good care of a problem wife. He puts up with her lovingly. Every time she does something ugly, she retreats into her persona of a nut case to escape blame. It’s a ruse. This too he forgives. The man’s a saint.
The film is beautifully filmed and staged, and the hotel setting and set decoration are remarkable. It is not a waste of time to see these two together. And they drive the most beautiful car you have ever seen, a Citroen, I believe. Check it out and drool.