Gods must be gods, creatures without frailties. That’s the message of the PR campaign for Brad Pitt’s new film, as tight a campaign as they come, run by the man who tried to save Johnny Depp’s reputation. The film is F1, a motor racing tale, and that’s a fair metaphor for film stars of Pitt’s calibre too: hot and beautiful things that, without careful handling, blow up. It’s part of the joy of watching them. And will the debacle of Brangelina – his marriage to Angelina Jolie, which formally ended in 2024 – damage the film? The children, presumably, can take care of themselves.
There is a backlash to F1, and not because of its subject matter. It relates to the end of Pitt’s marriage to Jolie. It ended with a fight on a private plane in 2016: Jolie alleged that Pitt shook her, poured beer and wine on her, and assaulted two of their children, which he denies. She filed for divorce days later. Now, as F1 opens, there are posts on Substack and Reddit insisting, “He’s hot. He’s a good actor. But there are skeletons.” Or: “Brad Pitt has shown us who he really is. Why do we refuse to see it?”
A piece called Brad Pitt is Fooling You on the US site Vulture – Kremlinology for film stars – said, “The cumulative effect of F1 and its press tour have been a carefully tuned charm offensive meant to obscure, if not outright bury, the alleged violent particulars of his behaviour toward ex-wife Angelina Jolie. Pitt has been so successful at this rehabilitation that most of the public don’t even understand what he’s trying to rehabilitate himself for”.
Pitt is the closest we have to an old-fashioned film star, which is why Quentin Tarantino, who knows more about cinema than anyone, cast him as the heroic stuntman who saves Sharon Tate from the Manson Family in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Pitt won a Best Supporting Oscar for the part in 2020, and that’s both a sucker punch and a joke: Pitt is the leading man of our times.
It’s a numbers game: Pitt is younger than Harrison Ford, the platonic ideal; thinner than Russell Crowe, the interesting, angry one; less odd than Tom Cruise, the one who loves machines, possibly because he is one; less generic than the “Hot Chrises” (Evans, Hemsworth, Pratt and Pine); more mobile than Michael Caine, who is 92; he didn’t punch Chris Rock at the Oscars (Will Smith) and – and this is the crucial thing – he is handsomer than all of them.
Pitt – the name is also a joke; he is the antonym of his name – is a square-jawed homage to the Golden Age of American Masculinity: essentially, he is their Brexit. With the sexual charisma usually and righteously denied to WASPS, he looks to me, above all things, like a jam sandwich and milkshake after a hike through Iran. If he didn’t exist, he would have been dreamt up by Don Draper of Mad Men to sell cowboy hats, or anything.
Every woman of my generation remembers his break-out role in Thelma and Louise (1991), though he was barely on-screen. After he makes love to Thelma (Geena Davis) she defenestrates, and Louise (Susan Sarandon) asks if she is crazy or on drugs. Neither: she spent the night with Brad Pitt, and, she concludes, a smiling augur, “I finally understand what all the fuss is about”. The writer Michael Angeli said Pitt has, “a smile that could set feminism back twenty-five years”.
But there’s a shadow on the moon. Pitt liked to date his co-stars, like a man with no imagination, the luckiest man in the world, or someone who has no idea where the line between reality and fantasy exists. (He is not alone). I can’t decide which. It could be all three. In the 90s, reading about his romantic life, I felt I was watching a lumberjack climb a Christmas Tree. He dated Geena Davis after Thelma and Louise; Juliette Lewis after Kalifornia (1993); and Gwyneth Paltrow after Seven (1995): they got engaged, so there is a parallel universe in which he embodies male Goop. He married Jennifer Aniston, his female twin – they have matching jaw bones, their nepo baby would have been a jawbone – in 2000; then he left her for Angelina Jolie after they co-starred in Mr and Mrs Smith (2005). It’s an irony that the film shares a name with a clearing house for hotels for adulterers. The tabloids named them Brangelina. It was, in the awful way of things – life is art, and art is life – their biggest role yet.
Brangelina collapsed for the reason I imagine all film star marriages collapse: who is the fairest of them all? They bickered over a vineyard, which is typical here, and only here. The divorce was finalised last December, and he is now dating Ines de Ramon, who is notably not an actress, but works with jewellery: beautiful things that cannot talk. The romantic trajectory makes sense: there is no actress more famous than Angelina Jolie. Pitt has completed actresses. He was never charged, let alone convicted, and, old fashioned that I am, I must consider him innocent. I’m not saying he didn’t do it. I am saying he is innocent, and that is why his career endures.
For an actor, Pitt is as functional as the parts he plays: a phlegmatic, topless Everyman, a role he plays so well it’s easy to forget that most younger film stars – the hot Chrises in particular – mimic his shtick, but less well. They come off less like Tarantino dreamt-up stuntmen from the silver age of Hollywood than short-haul airline pilots. Even Pitt’s alcoholism – there is usually alcoholism, or sex addiction, or drug addiction – is downbeat. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous and has apparently stopped drinking. That’s well short of Richard Pryor’s story. It’s so common, it even happened to me.
In truth, Pitt is barely mad enough to even be a film star. I understand his publicists’ desire to protect him for money. Consider Johnny Depp’s profile as self-harm for Rolling Stone in 2018 – he essentially lay down in a mansion in north London and talked nonsense – or, notoriously, F Scott Fitzgerald’s 40th birthday interview in the New York Times, which had quotes from the nurse treating him for alcoholism (Fitzgerald was a film star in spirit). Compared to almost any true film star – Paul Newman, Richard Burton, Errol Flynn? – Pitt is a jam sandwich. Watch his early appearance in Dallas as the respectful boyfriend of Ray’s daughter: that’s who he is on screen, and who he has remained. I even wonder if the pieces about his “edginess” – reanimating the Brangelina catastrophe – were actually planted by his publicists. That kind of cynicism exists in Hollywood, and only in Hollywood.
On Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd, who he met at AA in 2016, Shepherd asked him: “Have you ever heard this Cary Grant quote, ‘Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.’ You relate to that at all?” Cary Grant – born Archie Leach in Bristol, the motherless boy who ran off with the circus – was talking about the great cliché specific to actors: the mask eats the face. Pitt replied, “Maybe in the early years. I don’t know. I don’t think much about perception anymore.” His answer is no, then. Pitt was trying to say, though delicately: I am not mad. As I said – one of a kind.