The death of Edward Albee this week was an excuse to revisit one of the greatest semi-factual toxic marriages of cinema: the movie version of his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were in a state of boozy, agonised
meltdown, and those performances may well have been a catharsis for
personal issues.
Perhaps our generation has its own Woolf-anxiety couple in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who today filed for divorce after being an item since 2005. They have only been married since 2014,
which will give pause to all those who fear that getting legally
hitched amplifies the existing problems in any long-term relationship.
For outsiders to speculate about their private pain would be
impertinent, especially considering the courage with which Jolie has faced her own health issues. But the fact is that the Jolie-Pitt alliance began with a movie about marriage – and now appears to have ended with one.
They got together at the very beginning, after filming the action
comedy Mr and Mrs Smith, playing supercool assassins: each of their
professions is a secret from the other – and each of them finally gets
an assignment to kill the other.
It was, in a semi-intentional way, a brilliant parable for marriage
and Hollywood career-partnership and the frenemy/spousenemy qualities
inherent in a competitive working situation.
Mr and Mrs Smith
featured very droll scenes of them side-by-side together on the couch,
in archly “civilian” mode, apparently attending couples therapy. (It
also had a surreally random moment at the very end, in which Mrs Smith
confesses out of the blue that she is Jewish.) There was a kind of
meta-hilarity in all this, and it might even have given the start of
their romance a screwball quality, were it not for the fact that Brad
was already married to Jennifer Aniston.
They worked together just twice more. Brad Pitt was the producer of A Mighty Heart
(2007), directed by Michael Winterbottom, in which Jolie played Mariane
Pearl, wife of missing journalist Daniel Pearl – a role in which she
was controversially required to wear makeup to play a woman of partly
Cuban descent. It was not a very successful film, though undoubtedly a
seriously intended one, and clearly something to which both Pitt and
Jolie were committed.
But their relationship appears to have ended on camera, too. The second film in which they acted together, By the Sea
(2014), was an agonisingly detailed, 1960s-style portrait of a marriage
which is set in the south of France, and which appeared indebted to
Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road.
There are long scenes of moody, eloquent silence in their hotel room,
in which Jolie retreats into depression and Pitt gets picturesquely
drunk at a neighbourhood bar.
I felt it was a little absurd at the time – but actually, this is a
movie which improves in retrospect. It is ambitious and heartfelt.
Was By the Sea the last therapeutic gasp for Brangelina? The couple
they portrayed on screen were working through their problems, and
perhaps Brad and Angelina were working through their own problems too.
Or perhaps they were doing the opposite: creating a massive delusional
diversionary tactic, a fiction which looked equivalent to their own
problems but wasn’t, a giant project with which they could wrest back
creative control of their personal lives from the gossips.
Jolie’s character in that film had no children, but the actor herself
has a large family of adopted and biological children – a source of
tension that is not really touched on in the film.
Perhaps they will work together again, and Burton-Taylor nostalgists
might even wonder about the possibility of their remarrying. By the Sea
deserves another look. They are certainly a really potent on-screen
partnership.
