Jolie Pitt’s ‘Sea’ not great but not a joke
With “By the Sea,” writer-director Angelina Jolie Pitt almost scores a real success with a very difficult type of movie. As it stands, she has made a film with many unexpected and rare qualities, and if, in the end, they don’t quite add up to a satisfying experience, “By the Sea” is still an attempt worthy of some respect and attention.
In her third feature as a director, Jolie Pitt once again shows a marked talent for the visual aspects of storytelling. Her shot selection is impeccable, and her compositions are artful without being selfconscious. If she puts her camera on a street scene or on people dining in a cafe, there is always something that catches the eye, something that has the feeling of visual poetry. And she makes no unthinking mistakes. If a character is standing on a balcony looking at something in the distance, Jolie Pitt doesn’t swoop in with her camera and show us the thing in close-up. She has sense and restraint.
She also seems to understand everything about her husband, Brad Pitt, as an actor because he has rarely been this good. He plays a writer in the 1970s who travels with his wife ( Jolie Pitt) to a small French town along the Mediterranean. His writing is in trouble, and for reasons that only reveal themselves gradually, the marriage is falling apart. He goes off every day with his pen and notebook and comes back drunk, and she mostly stays in the room and sits on the balcony.
It’s a measure of Jolie Pitt’s ability to hold the viewer that some of the most engrossing scenes don’t advance the plot; they’re merely scenes of being. Sitting there drinking in the afternoon, the writer draws out the rumpled old bartender (Niels Arestrup), and we understand the writer’s charm, empathy and fundamental decency, even as we’re fascinated by the other man’s life story.
The role of the wife has lots of sides to it, but the major notes are weirdness and vulnerability. Jolie Pitt has weirdness just coming through the door. Her thinness, her enormous eyes and her facade of implacable coldness and strength give her the aura of a very attractive space alien, and so nothing she does — including spying on the young couple next door, through a hole in the wall — comes as a surprise. But Jolie Pitt seems about as vulnerable as a steam shovel, and as the wife’s fragility becomes an important element as the film wears on, that entire area of character is lost.
It is rare to see a film so completely thought out in visual terms, from the way a small grocery store is lit and photographed to the small detail of a husband’s turning his wife’s sunglasses over so the lenses don’t scratch on the table. But at a certain point, the writing has to deliver.
A running element — the wife’s almost vampiric interest in the couple next door and her resentment of their happiness — makes for interesting scenes. But once Jolie Pitt reveals where she’s going, the movie falls to pieces. Once we know what the couple’s mystery is, “By the Sea” doesn’t make sense and begins to seem the one thing it hasn’t all along — silly.