Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
That tremor you felt beneath your feet today was the news that Hollywood has long been bracing for: Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt (and asking for custody of the pair’s six children), citing “irreconcilable differences.” The so-called Brangelina relationship has been blockbuster gossip fodder for its entire run; Pitt and Jolie first got together, allegedly, on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, where they played a married couple who turn out to be spies who get the order to off one another. The Doug Liman-directed film was a box-office smash and set the entire gossip industry ablaze for the next decade. Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston? Kaput. “Brangelina” was born, six kids followed, but the two of them wouldn’t share the movie screen again for another ten years.
It’s not like those intervening years weren’t good to them. Pitt got Oscar nominations for Benjamin Button and Moneyball, got into the producing game with hits like 12 Years a Slave and The Big Short, and essentially became an actor-mogul. Jolie, for her part, worked less frequently, but she managed a portfolio that combined popular hits (Salt; Maleficent) with smaller movies that paid off in good reviews (A Mighty Heart) or awards (Changeling). She also began directing, albeit not all that successfully, with rocky receptions for In the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken. Then last year, there was By the Sea, Jolie’s third directorial effort and the first to star her and Brad Pitt together. Interestingly, now that it’s the last film they’ll have made together as man and wife, the film is a portrait of a wildly unhappy marriage, and as it was also written by Jolie, it now stands as a real eyeballs-emoji of a movie.
In By the Sea, married couple Roland and Vanessa take a holiday in France in the 1970s. As the title implies, their villa is by the sea. Over the course of a long two hours, Vanessa stares vacantly out to the sea, goes on a few listless trips to the grocery store, and eventually becomes obsessed with the young couple in the room next door whose sex lives are far more interesting. The ultimate reveal that Vanessa and Roland’s marriage is barely recovering from her two miscarriages is neither all that surprising nor all that illuminating, but the real draw of By the Sea isn’t the plot twists but rather the luxurious tension of the scenes, as Vanessa and Roland ramp up to their ultimate confrontation. It’s not a great movie, maybe not even all that good of a movie, but it didn’t deserve the bulk of the jeers it got upon its release. Ten years after Mr. and Mrs. Smith, it seemed that Pitt and Jolie were still not extricable as screen presences separate from their tabloid presences. In the end, they were never able to make a movie together simply as actors; or even as megawatt movie stars. They were only ever allowed to be Brangelina.
This does often happen in Hollywood. Movies, good and bad, become suffused with the real-life circumstances surrounding them. Cleopatra certainly would not have attained its outsized reputation were it not for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s tempestuous romantic history. Even a movie as cerebral and directorially muscular as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut can never be truly separated from the fact that it’s Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s last movie together. Brad and Angelina’s celebrity always overshadowed everything else about them, yes. But in a way, that makes movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and By the Sea indelible in a way they never would have been otherwise.
