Pathetic Pitt looking to score a PR victory
WHATEVER about the army of children, it’s easy to see who won custody of Brangelina’s PR mastermind. The genius who created the planet’s greatest celebrity couple from the ashes of Brad Pitt’s infidelity and gave birth to a philanthropic rainbow family of world citizens seems to have hunkered down with Team Brad.
Their new project? To reinvent the fallen father of Hollywood’s most mythologised family, now cleared of shocking allegations of child abuse, into an idol for Middle America.
Hollywood is not short of stars who redeemed themselves after a terrific fall from grace.
Robert Downey Junior and Mel Gibson pulled themselves back from the brink, although neither enjoyed Brad Pitt’s sensational star power. This might explain why neither had to go to the same drastic extremes as Pitt in order to save their reputation.
For Brad has launched his comeback playing the snivelling part of Brad the Pitiful – a rich and pampered celebrity who has only in middle age discovered what is truly important in life.
Lonely, anguished Pitt admits that the loss of his family was ‘selfinflicted’ and that he is undergoing therapy while he wrestles with his dark demons and stays off the booze. From his luxury home in the Hollywood Hills, now eerily silent since the family bolted, he pulls at our heart strings, while quoting from the philosophical greats – Sting, Churchill and Picasso.
His sole companion is his dog and only the simplest things in life can raise his spirits – from his kids’ smiles to sculpting clay, his new hobby. He says he envies an African woman he once met, who lost nine family members but could laugh more boisterously than he’s ever been able to. Brad goes on and on in this crass and self-indulgent vein until his ever-striding across the screen in Oceans 11 or walking the red carpet wreathed in Oscar glory with his beautiful wives, seems like another life. For the magazine photographs, he curls up like an embryo on the flat lunar sands of some American desert – a corporeal manifestation of his inner torment and broken spirit. He confesses that he spent the Brangelina years in an alcoholic stupor, and he has been self-medicating since he was a teenager with cannabis and drink.
Naturally, he pins his vices on his strict Baptist upbringing in Hicksville or rather Springville, Missouri and his tough no-nonsense father for turning him into an emotionally unavailable ‘retard’. ‘Right now I know that manual labour is good for me… I’ve got to start from the bottom, I’ve got to sweep my floor,’ he says about taking up sculpture.
‘I don’t really think of myself much as an actor any more. It takes up so little of my year and my focus. Films feel like a cheap pass for me,’ he speaks about the world that has gifted him such unparalleled fame and fortune.
And lest we forget his millions of fans whose hearts must be melting in an odd mixture of love and concern for the extremely troubled Brad Pitt at his introspective and grief-stricken best.
He may be too old to be a pin-up, but as a wounded bird and unwitting casualty of Hollywood’s ruthless machine, he can still be a female fantasy figure.
As Brad Pitt embarks on the next chapter while extricating himself completely from Brangelina, he might command his most sympathetic female following yet.