Angelina, firmly planted in two worlds
The glamorous A-list actress has found lasting inspiration in war survivors, aid workers
LOS ANGELES— Angelina Jolie was sitting barefoot on the porch of her luscious new home, explaining why she wants to save the world, when duty called. Her youngest son, Knox, 9, poked his little blond head around the screen door.
“Shiloh needs you,” the boy said quietly, referring to his middle sister, who is 11.
“Shi?” Jolie called, before disappearing with a whoosh of her black caftan. Ten minutes later, she was back. Shiloh’s beloved bearded dragon, Vlad, had fallen ill and was now, to Shiloh’s distress, convalescing at the vet’s.
Jolie went on to lament the imbalance of a world where Californian pets get cushy care while millions of people the world over lack access to proper medical treatment. It went unmentioned that she was saying this from her $25-million (U.S.), twoacre hilltop estate, in a gated pocket of the Los Feliz neighbourhood, a home she bought for herself and her six children in the spring, after her split from Brad Pitt.
Perhaps more than any other celebrity, Jolie, 42, has kept herself firmly planted in two vastly different worlds. She’s both the glamorous Alister whose every move is tracked in headlines and the humanitarian dogooder who has made more than 60 trips to the field as part of her United Nations work. Apparent contradictions account for her elusive allure. Jolie has been enduringly hard to peg, a woman who cannot easily be lumped into a single category because she occupies many at once.
She is a peerless glamazon as well as the women’s health advocate who told the world about her preventive double mastectomy. She has a meticulously managed public profile yet professes not to care what others think. She remains near the pinnacle of celebrity’s cruel pyramid, even though her recent movies only made money when she was camouflaged ( Maleficent, Kung Fu Panda). She is obsessed over — if, in the United States at least, not exactly beloved — and fixed in the cultural firmament as America’s vixen despite having a half-dozen-strong brood.
And even though the public appetite for salacious details of her personal life has long eclipsed interest in the films she has directed, Jolie doggedly brings tough, obscure stories to the screen. Three of the four movies she has made are set in wartime, including her latest, First They Killed My Father, based on the true story of Loung Ung, who as a young girl survived the Cambodian genocide and is now one of Jolie’s close friends.
It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday.
While Jolie’s earlier movies garnered tepid reviews, several critics have anointed First They Killed My Father her best yet. It is told entirely from the little girl’s point of view, in Khmer, and received a standing ovation at the Telluride Film Festival. Netflix is to begin streaming it on Sept. 15.
Jolie said she could not have made the movie had she not first directed In the Land of Blood and Honey ( 2011) about the Bosnian war, and Unbroken (2014), based on the true story of an American G.I. taken prisoner in the Second World War.
“It wasn’t a conscious plan of, I was going to make war films; it’s just what I was drawn to,” she said.
Jolie has an indelible connection to Cambodia, not least because it completely reordered her life. Before first visiting in 2000 to shoot Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, she had been a Hollywood wild child, a ravishing Goth weirdo who, at the Oscars that year dressed like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and locked lips with her brother. She also got publicly hot and heavy with her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, and wore a locket with droplets of his blood.
The grace and humility she saw in the Cambodian people, along with the lasting effects of the genocide, threw Hollywood life into unflattering relief.
“Once you get exposed to what’s really happening in the world, and other people’s realities, you just can’t ever not know, and you can’t ever wake up and pretend it’s not happening,” she said, “Your entire life shifts.”
She adopted Maddox, now 16, from an orphanage, divorced Thornton, and threw herself into humanitarian and environmental work, finding lasting inspiration in wartime survivors and aid workers.
“The real will to survive, and the strength of the human spirit, and the love of the human family becomes so present, and that’s how we should all be living,” Jolie said. “When you’re around it, it’s quite contagious, and you know to learn from it.”
She intimated that First They Killed My Father might have informed her decision to leave Pitt. The film centres on Ung’s family members, some of whom survived, and Jolie said she thought a lot about what family meant during production, and how they should help each other and take care of one another (the film is adapted from Ung’s 2000 book of the same name).
“Loung had such horrors in her life but also had so much love, and that is why she’s all right today,” Jolie said. “That is something I need to remember.”
Determined to make the film as Cambodian as possible, Jolie teamed with Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who received an Oscar nomination for his 2014 documentary The Missing Picture, and enlisted thousands of Cambodians as extras. Jolie said Maddox was her righthand man, working on the script, taking meeting notes and bantering with Panh in French. Some of the scenes were shot on massacre sites, so the crew arranged for monks to pray and set out incense and offerings beforehand.
Ung said Jolie, who has Cambodian citizenship, shares her countrymen’s sensibilities.
“In Cambodia, you don’t raise your voice, you speak kindly to people, you greet people with your hands together and bow,” Ung said, “All of this comes naturally to her.”