BY THE SEA, dir. Angelina Jolie-Pitt
I was in high school when MR. AND MRS. SMITH came out, and I remember a lot of the young ladies I talked to (including the date I saw it with) going kinda gaga for the coupling of megahot megastars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The popular narrative was that Jolie had stolen Pitt from former wife Jennifer Aniston on the set of that movie, but their chemistry was so piping hot in that spy vs. spy film that it seemed to assuage the FRIENDS-philes who were previously outraged that the “bitchy” Jolie had swooped in and ruined their marriage.
Cut to 10 years later. Jolie and Pitt are one of the last true Hollywood power couples, with their behind-the-scenes life (and six children) the subject of constant speculation and adulation. Pitt remains a full-fledged movie star, headlining stuff like INGLORIOUS BASTARDS and TREE OF LIFE, while earning Best Picture Oscars for his producing work on THE DEPARTED and 12 YEARS A SLAVE. Jolie, now Jolie-Pitt, has segued into directing, helming IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY and UNBROKEN over the past couple of years. Now, they collide onscreen again in Jolie-Pitt’s latest film, and their real-life love, as well as the privileged life we associate with the couple, is both the best and the worst thing going for it.
BY THE SEA is about a wealthy, somewhat famous married couple who retreat to a small hotel in the South of France “to get away from it all” sometime during the Nixon administration. The man, Roland, is a writer whose first book was a success, but who has now wallowed into obscurity and alcoholism. His wife, Vanessa, is a former dancer who has devolved into a lifeless, pill-popping shut-in. Needless to say, their relationship is somewhat strained, and Roland’s attempts at writing are as unsuccessful as Vanessa’s attempts at expanding her lifestyle. Enter a young couple played by Melanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud. The gorgeous newlyweds set up shop in the room next door to Roland and ‘Nessa, and the latter finds herself quickly intrigued by the intense passion and youthful vigor of hew new neighbors (some casual attention from the often-shirtless man doesn’t hurt either). She finds a hole in the wall, and like Gena Rowlands in ANOTHER WOMAN (an actress Jolie-Pitt singled out in her introduction), she starts passing her days spying on the other couple as they talk, flirt, and make love. Eventually, Roland catches her in the act, and the two start making it a daily activity, with pillows next to the hole becoming permanent fixtures and a rhythm developing between the two as they alternate peeking into the hole at the shenanigans next door. However, as they become develop a real relationship with the couple, their voyeurism and manipulations start to put both marriages at risk, and put Roland and Vanessa's problems under a magnifying glass.
If the narrative, centered completely around a hole in the wall of a hotel, seems fixated on something minor that serves as a lofty metaphor, it’s because that’s the kind of film this is. Not a lot happens in this 132-minute film, at least superficially; this is a film centered around small, intimate exchanges, intense glances, and what is not and could never be said. As such, there’s an inherent anticlimax to the whole thing. We become part of this intense, emotionally turbulent marriage, but we’re never made privy to too much and there are no big revelations or events that heat everything into a boil. This is simply the portrayal of a marriage that is strained to the breaking point by things we don’t learn about until the back half-hour, and your enjoyment of the film is dependent on your ability to be satisfied by exactly, and only that.
There are shades of another Rowlands film, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, in Jolie-Pitt’s substance addled misbehavior and Pitt’s occasional, clueless interrogations along the lines of “What’s wrong with you?” or “What are you doing?!” But Cassavetes this is not. This is a formal, European-looking film, as carefully written, blocked, and shot as those films were improvised and loose. The dialogue is sparse, but meant to cut, and Jolie-Pitt spends a lot of the time either completely silent or moaning and whimpering around the hotel room. Despite the gorgeously shot local scenery, far too much of the film is confined to their little space, and there are countless moments of the couple entering and exiting the room alone, together, and occasionally with guests.
The central problem with the Laurent/Poupaud plot is that there’s only one way it can go, and it’s telegraphed very early on. Jolie-Pitt (who also wrote the film) obviously thinks there’s a lot to her character’s lust and jealousy towards the young, frequently fornicating couple, but it feels like old hat. We know what someone rich and beautiful and older will do in this situation, long before Pitt directly accuses her of trying to wreck both her marriage and theirs. It becomes quickly apparent that we have to sit back and watch these two characters, as wealthy, attractive, and successful as Jolie-Pitt and Pitt themselves, decide just how much impact they want to have on the young couples’ life. The only tension comes from the specifics of Roland and Vanessa’s situation, and that final reveal is trite, cliched, and kind of sexist (hint: I read roughly 9 million “Is this okay?” think-pieces when a big comic book film used the exact same reveal to justify the behavior of one of its female characters).
If this exact film was made with unknowns, I’m not sure I could’ve sat through it. Thankfully, Jolie-Pitt and Pitt are capital “m” Movie Stars, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an onscreen couple as sexy and captivating in their middle age as these two. The film is completely wrapped around their physical relationship, and the body language between the two says more than the bulk of the dialogue. It is fun to sit there and wonder how much of this was inspired by the couple’s real-life relationship, as their sexual interest in Laurent and Poupaud make Jolie-Pitt’s massive, impossibly radiant eyes widen and Pitt’s sly grin creep across his face.
Unfortunately, Jolie-Pitt fares better when Vanessa is borderline comatose or casually shrugging off any and all invitations by the outside world than when she’s undergoing emotional turmoil or crying her mascara off her face. There’s a lot of moaning and whimpering as she lays around the bed, the floor, the patio, and the bathub of their hotel room, and it often recalls more her mood-killing, over-the-top behavior at the end of GIRL, INTERRUPTED than the star-making coolness that preceded it. Luckily, even though she hasn’t been onscreen that often over the past few years, which sometimes shows in her awkward line deliveries and overly-big moments, her husband is more comfortable with the camera than ever. Looking more and more like Robert Redford as he ages, Pitt owns the screen at every possible moment, looking impossibly handsome, conflicted, and majestic as he elicits gasps and laughs from the audience with equal ease. His Roland strikes a casual, fun-to-watch friendship with a local bartender, played by Niels Arestrub (A PROPHET), and he cuts a Hemingway-esque figure as he drinks and smokes his sorrows away in his attempt to get his writing mojo back. It’s one of his best, subtlest performances in years, and makes me think that he belongs in Jolie-Pitt’s films more than she even does; she brings out a complicated softness in him that some films either ignore or heavily exploit, which, at the cost of making us wholly and completely on his character’s side, gives us an emotional in that carries us through the movie.
Still, this is a tough film to love. Laurent and Poupaud are lovely and charming, but are used more for their firm bodies than anything else. The occasionally showy hints at Roland and ‘Nessa’s past end up not really going anywhere, and there’s not one conclusion that doesn’t neatly, patly fall in line with what you were expecting. This is clearly a film built around direction, attitude, and performance, and in that sense it has something going for it. It is lovely to look at, deliberately paced, and thoroughly focused on character like a ‘70s film by Rafelson or Antonioni. But by the two-hour mark, when I realized that I wasn’t going to be surprised by anything that transpired, it started to lose me, and I started to think more about how much fun it was for the Pitts to take the family to Malta to shoot this thing (Maddox is credited as a “trainee”) than about the actual narrative unfolding in front of me. The shots of the titular sea and the countryside are strikingly captured by Christian Berger (THE PIANO TEACHER), particularly the opening titles, but so much of the story is confined to the same interior location that these moments are merely brief interludes of beauty amidst the depressing louting about. This was my first experience with a Jolie-Pitt-directed film, and though I wasn’t blown away, there’s enough there that I could see myself taking a chance on the next one, particularly if she gets her husband in there, front-and-center.
Go BY THE SEA at the Landmark Theaters in L.A. and New York on November 13th before it expands on the 20th.
