BRAD PITT

MARQUEE PLAYER HOLDS ALL THE ACES IN MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR BOX OFFICE GAME

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

A

marquee player can carry a film and carry a cast of players specifically chosen for supporting the actor’s character on screen.

But each era of film history may only have a handful of leading actors of a generation that fulfil this role for filmmakers by stirring guaranteed financial returns with critical acclaim and celebrity gossip into box office magic.

The era of cinema before the digital age involved poetic storytelling and impactful realism that merged location shoots with studio sets to distinguish a good film from a great film and a modestly successful film from a box office smash.

Brad Pitt continues to be one of those few actor icons, surviving that era of intense professional and personal scrutiny, in part by moving through fame and fortune as opposed to remaining static and allowing that same magical world to deconstruct all that has been created.

Celebrity was something there before but with the entertainment television, fame and fortune brought a lot of misery for privacy rights and the need for creative solitude. 

Pitt transitioned from television soaps to feature films and to being fodder for tabloid news to iconic acting and then to producing films.

In the Assassination of Jesse James (2007) the Kid from Missouri has reached the height of his acting powers with a screen character now developed in such a manner that the acting persona can be commodified to match the needs of a script.

Pitt cocreates the biopic film, about an American anti-hero, as a producer with producers Ridley Scott and Tony Scott. 

Director Andrew Dominik has caught the brightest of Hollywood stars in his lens, as well as a talented supporting cast that includes Casey Affleck, Sam Shephard, Sam Rockwell and Jeremy Renner.

Pitt as the American outlaw Jesse James performs a range of emotions playing opposite Affleck. Affleck would go on to win an Academy Award for his performance in Manchester by the Sea (2016) costarring Michelle Williams.

The anti-hero James rolls through town as focused and determined as a gunman in the wild west, but Pitt humanizes the role by showing how the criminal madness and the pressure of being the most hunted outlaw gradually begins to wear him down and cause paranoia.

In the role, Pitt clearly has developed a central screen character with a shifting metaphysical mask that can create emotions captured within the director’s camera frame.

But the ability to then stylize the screen character to the script and transition seamlessly and naturally from sanity to madness, from love to vengeance, and from distrust to paranoia sets his performances apart from even the best of the Hollywood elite of A-list actors.

Pitt transitioned from television to feature films with a brief but turning point performance in Thelma & Louise (1991). The character, J. D., has the audacity to steal the getaway cash from two restless housewives escaping all the chains of misogyny and patriarchy rampant back home in suburban America during the decade.

This turning point in the film sets off Thelma and Louise down the road from which they will never return.

But before everyone could get an answer about who was that young actor in that film with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, director Robert Redford had already cast Pitt in one of the most beautiful and poignant films about a Christian family and two close knit brothers from Montana.

In the River Runs Through It (1992) Pitt portrays the more reckless younger of two brothers born into a Presbyterian family with the symbolic opening narrative marked by a wild ride over the white river rapids in a neighbor’s wooden boat.

Paul Maclean proves all the trouble his preacher father could have prayed to God to thwart.

Almost 20 years later Pitt flips the character roles by playing the grieving Christian father in a impressionist telling of existential questions surrounding the loss of a young son in a Bible thumping family, in The Tree of Life (2011). 

Jessica Chastain plays the mother and wife nurturing a family in Waco, Texas. Sean Penn plays the eldest son Jack as a grown up sent down that same existential path by an adult life that often poses more questions than provides answers.

Director Terrance Malick combines a music score with impressionists dream sequences that overpower the internal monologues of the characters in the opening narrative.

After several long esoteric scenes painting the formation of life, Pitt becomes the stern father of three sons determined to raise his children into adults based on the Christian values found in the Bible.

Malick captures the slow pace of suburban life and the restlessness of childhood as a personification of the esoteric dreamscape.

Kids get into trouble and do stupid things. Children sometimes also develop a mean streak that must be sorted out after the fact despite their parent’s well meaning efforts to prevent them.

This film recreates the spirit of the family dynamic established in A River Runs Through It (1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994) and the early acting roles that made Pitt a feature film movie star. But the screen character has matured and become more artful.

In A River Runs Through It, the Presbyterian minister, played by Tom Skeritt, must maintain authority over the two boys as their childhood sense of misadventure threatens to harm their innocence and the innocence of his congregation.

The two brothers make it to adulthood alright, but one son goes out of state for college while the other young man stays home to pursue a journalism career, and he nevertheless finds trouble everywhere right near home just as he did as a child.

Director Robert Redford connects end to end three linear narratives by showing the brothers as children and then as teenagers and then reuniting the brothers as successful young adults for many poignant moments.

Pitt studied journalism at the University of Missouri before heading to Hollywood to work in front of the camera. Redford casts Pitt as the young adult who stays put in small town Montana to become a star newspaper reporter, while his older brother leaves for college to become a teacher of literature.

On screen, Pitt’s real life character meets his fantasy screen character. And then celebrity soon follows Pitt about the Hollywood streets as much as the director’s camera does on set.

Pitt enters into a series of off screen romances with his costars that provide extra glitter for the box office magic. Relationships with Juliette Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie kept the star power ignited in between box office releases.

Pitt had garnered early on the expectations of celebrity gossipers and film critics that he would reinvigorate the Hollywood film industry with the excitement of a James Dean, Robert Redford and Tom Cruise – that very special contagious excitement that occurs at the box office with that ever so rare confluence of good looks, physical charm and acting talent.

In Spy Game (2001) Pitt and Redford work together in front of the camera this time as two operatives of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The film has self-referential moments with Redford playing the CIA mentor who recruits Pitt off the battlefields of Vietnam to run black ops for the CIA.

Nathan Muir, played by Redford, must eventually devise a double blind to obtain Tom Bishop’s (Brad Pitt’s) release from a Chinese prison after Bishop’s off the grid attempt to free a prisoner of conscience goes sideways.

In a way, the character role is simultaneously self-referential and intertextual on another level as Pitt proves his acting art by playing socially marginalized characters not quite government approved in ready mode for public display. 

Muir must finance the covert operation since the spy agency is busy seeking diplomatic solutions for an operative that has gone rogue, just as Redford brought Pitt from television to the big screen in a River Runs Through It.

In Fight Club (1999), Pitt plays a quirky character surviving in an underground economy in plain sight of everyone. The David Fincher film costars Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Norton as dysfunctional socialites finding celebrity status in the self-help groups of a big city.

Pitt plays boutique soap manufacturer Tyler Durden who uses the fat waste from lipo-suction clinics as a base for the beauty product he is selling back to the beauty elite.

Durden has an even darker side as the organizer of an underground men’s club that meets in basement-type settings for off the grid bare knuckle fights as a means of self-help.

Director Terry Gillian also chooses Pitt for the lead quirk in Twelve Monkeys (1995), starring Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe, in this dark telling of life in a world that has self-imploded.

Jeffrey Goines (Pitt’s character) seems to be a collage of the three Marx Brothers all dressed up as one for a one off turn at social activism that involves kidnapping his scientist father and releasing all the animals from the city zoo.

Goines meets James Cole, played by Willis, in an institution. 

Cole is picked up by mental health authorities after seeming a bit too disoriented after his transportation from the future.

Willis and Stowe costar in leading roles, but Pitt plays an intrinsic supporting role so memorable and so crazy as to be comical. Pitt earns an Oscar nomination for the performance.

In that same year, Pitt plays a young homicide detective moved into a more difficult neighborhood of crime than his experience may suggest that he can handle. Se7en (1995) too seems to be a self-referential role for Pitt. 

Detective Mills needs to continually explain that he has enough experience to lead the investigation into a series of grisly murders riddled with biblical references, as if Pitt were at auditions trying to convince everyone he is a lead actor and not just fit for supporting roles.

Soon thereafter, Pitt becomes able to mark success by being in demand and having the ability to pick and choose leading roles in scripts sent his way, rather than having producers and directors passing him by at auditions for leading roles.

Se7en is another David Fincher film, and another off the Hollywood grid performance, marking the talented actor’s preference for alternating blockbuster movie star film roles with down and dirty sideways art filled character roles throughout his feature film career.

Pitt also goes almost entirely dark as a serial killer in Kalifornia (1993), costarring Juliette Lewis, with David Duchovny playing the investigative reporter whose girlfriend pressures him to move to California. 

Pitt and Lewis develop characters that meet at a diner in the opening scenes, but the couple met already when developing a pair of characters for Too Young to Die (1990).

Director Dominic Sena transitions the narrative through a slow choppy esoteric moment before turning the serial killer one step away from being an investigative journalist and the journalist one step from becoming a murderer.

Early Grayce becomes a binary opposite to the Paul McLean character developed the year before. Paul gets into trouble, but he rides the thin good line whereas Early never strays too far out of the utterly dark evil side of a poorly lit street. 

The narrative then moves through the most intense scenes as the plot begins to reverse and become even more chaotic as many more people are threatened and killed.

Early on in his career, the Missouri Kid proves that his on screen character can play goofy but also dark and mysterious while his real life persona is grunge chic. 

The ability to stylize the performance to the script and then again go seamlessly and naturally from sanity to madness, from love to vengeance, and from distrust to paranoia sets the performances apart from even the best of the Hollywood elite.

In a way, Pitt is the live lead in a great line of celebrities of the era of film prior to social media who transferred the chemical energy from the off-screen real life impact on the collective consciousness to the on screen fantasy.

Like Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood created movie magic as much from the film persona as from the real life trials and tribulations of the greatest of film stars.

Without being an adoring fan, one might find eight or nine films in a movie collection over the years without having considered yourself a fan, just because Pitt is so talented and has chosen his film roles so sufficiently well as to avoid being typecast. 

All actors fear being typecast, because typecasting leads to predictability. And predictability leads to boredom for the film artist and the audience. But many actors also earn a living from being so treated by casting agents and filmmakers.

Pitt ensured that his performances would never be predictable.

The screen persona also remained separate from the tabloid self and also separate again from the real person that transitioned from Missouri to Hollywood to International star.

Pitt cannot really be pigeonholed other than as a talented actor who developed great film art within a variety of character performances through the sequential stages of an iconic cinematic career.

From $350 in his pocket leaving Missouri for California in 1986 to million dollar paychecks per film in Hollywood to sourcing tens of millions of dollars for film production around the world, Pitt has shaped and formed and commodified his own image to survive a difficult era of celebrity during which the acting art was often overlooked for real life controversies that merged the fantasy with the real and then spun everything around in a blur for both the actor and his adoring audience.

Pitt comes out as a bit of grunge era screen artist who pitches to the public alternative subcultures to that of the mainstream entertainment industry that brought him fame and fortune.

That self-destructive Montana newspaper reporter is actually a counter-culture operative that quickly moves into the deep underground running bootleg liquor.

Then a vampire and a serial killer and then the reckless and irresponsible activist in the surreal anti-institution Terry Gillian film. Even in Se7en the middle class street detective investigates a series of murders targeting the establishment.

The screen characters are often slightly off the grid and counterintuitive like the grunge scene emerging as a subculture to provide alternatives to classic rock and roll, punk and heavy metal all in the same guitar riff and beat of the drums.

That soft, charismatic defiance toward the establishment materialized as the soap maker who supports himself off the upper middle class, but then lives rough and dirty in an underground society, while his friends infiltrate the self-improvement revolution with cheap and dirty counterfeit copies of dysfunction.