OMGwyneth, you guys – Brangelina made a porno.
Well, no...not really, but Angelina Jolie Pitt’s third directorial effort, By the Sea (which features the filmmaker and her husband, Brad Pitt, as a sort of modern-day George and Martha), is the kind of #FOMO-inducing catnip that’s sure to send anyone who bothers seeking out the film on a daydream of Instagrams to come. And, yes, I can picture it clearly, the breathless Googling of “By the Sea, locations” that shall commence the second the lights come back on in your delightful local chain art house with comfy seats and available buckets of ice for the bubbly available within it, the only theater in town showing this slightly brutal, aimlessly pretentious dissection of a marriage at a crossroads.
At a crossroads at a charmingly quaint seaside resort of unconfirmed European provenance, honey. Because where else.
Obviously, they – her Vanessa, a former dancer, and his Roland, a writer fighting a mean case of the writer’s block – could be in France; just about everyone around speaks the language and has that air of, you know...nonchalance that is now so encapsulated by the holidaze hashtag. And they are, in fact, in France, for this production is definitely set there, the 1970s there that finally allows Jolie Pitt to play Elizabeth Taylor in the most indirect and deferential manner, since remaking Cleopatra is an idea that’s so last century: Angie’s remade Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, OKRRR, casting and recasting her main man as the Richard Burton for a new generation. FYI, though: The actual location was Malta’s island of Gozo, so bookin’ that next vacation.
The film is that ambitious.
Its designs on prestige, on important-ness, are only surpassed by its desire to be admired. Just like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Jolie Pitt’s proposition looks impossibly gorge – like a moving, talking, walking W magazine spread. Kudos to the cinematographer and the production design team: It’s all quite the special effect, especially because it upstages Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
It’s not that the spectacle of the film takes away from the story. Au contraire, the fantasia provides a welcome respite from the nonsense (right, Roland and Vanessa totally fit all those Louis Vuitton trunks of slinky, gauzy nightgowns and that cute little red typewriter that travels with its own accoutreument in that cute little classic coupe they drove in on...) and marital strife between these two. Roland drinks too much and writes too little during his days by the sea, chatting up the initially put-upon widower who keeps the local watering hole (A Prophet’s Niels Arestrup, his eyes profound with a deep and sad longing wisdowm); Nessa, as he calls her, takes too many pills, spends too much time confined to their room, contemplating death (past death, her own).
Neither talks to the other – really talk, I mean. There’s a hole between the two, and he’s on the verge of giving up trying to fill it or, at the very least, mend it. It isn’t until there’s a literal hole between ’em – a hole on a wall that allows the pair to peep into their next-room neighbors, young newlyweds portrayed by Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud – that Roland and Vanessa start getting real with each other, and that we learn what it was that wedged them apart.
Alas, it is all too terribly dull. Jolie Pitt is made up and styled for war...her eyes painted to draw you in, her nails softly painted, yet sharply pointed, her slinky wardrobe belying an inner storm of turmoil that unspools in whimpers, but it is Pitt who rises to the occasion in nominatable fashion. His Roland’s face is a portrait of pain, compassion, fed-up-ness, slight joy, and even slighter hope.
Too bad that by the time the recriminations and slaps start flying By the Sea, you’ll be thinking Mike Nichols did this better...and this woulda been way more engaging had Roland and Nessa been a little more like the Needdlers.
My Rating **
Photo: Celebuzz.com.
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