Roadside Hitchhiker To Astronaut: How Brad Pitt Became Hollywood’s Most Enduring Leading Man

Towards the beginning of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s mournful LA fantasy, Brad Pitt bums around. For almost 10 minutes, we watch him do precisely nothing of substance. He zooms through busy Californian streets, pulls up to his decrepit mobile home, talks to his dog, makes a cruddy mac and cheese, watches TV.

It’s the kind of scene that most actors would phone in, cycling through a series of tired, distracted motions for the benefit of an audience they assume will be thinking about other things anyway. But this is late-career Pitt we’re talking about, so the scene is a symphony of precise movements.

Pitt squints, blearily; slaps his thighs; gurns in his lopsided, shit-eating way; moves back and forth with an ease and playfulness that makes his body seem like an afterthought. When he drops a cylinder of dog food into a bowl from a great height, it’s with the same careful consideration that Al Pacino employed when launching into a monologue.

For at least the last 15 years, Pitt has excelled at exactly this, moving through space, doing pretty much nothing. In fact, it’s the primary focus of his new film Ad Astra, directed by celebrated New York auteur James Gray. In it, Pitt plays Roy McBride, an astronaut who must find his estranged father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) deep in the recesses of space.

The stakes of the film are monumental – McBride’s father is playing with an anti-matter material that threatens the safety of the entire galaxy. But, as ever, Pitt inhabits the role with a hypnotic, muted gravitas. Most of the work is done by his eyes. They’re sadder than they’ve ever been – filled with a terrible knowledge and a great fear for the future. He is the film’s little altar of calm as, around him, the planet’s fate hangs in the balance.

Pitt’s films weren’t always so fascinated by his face, of course. Pitt broke out as the sexy love interest, going shirtless in Thelma And Louise, and staring into sexy middle distance with those big baby blues in A River Runs Through It. Back then, he played scenes with the smouldering, simple intensity that Hollywood tends to expect from its leading men. Even still, from the outset, it was apparent that he wasn’t interested in inheriting the pretty boy title from Robert Redford.

In fact, he even tried playing Redford’s protégé in Spy Game, a muddled thriller that Pitt spends looking increasingly uncomfortable. It was only slowly, through work in Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, and Se7en that the true Pitt began to emerge. He didn’t go small, exactly – his work in 12 Monkeys is a zany, antic caricature. He just stopped playing the major moments big, and started playing the minor moments massive.

His grim realization of exactly what’s in the box at the end of Se7en is a work of glorious understatement, almost a coughed aside. Compare that to the moment, somewhere towards the back half of Fight Club, when he takes a long draw of a cigarette while wearing nothing but a plastic rubber glove. The first scene works because he barely does anything at all. The latter works because he does so much, pulling the smoke down into his lungs and letting the nicotine relax each of the muscles in his face one by one, as though the simple movement is made up of a thousand individual beats.

This is how it goes these days. Pitt’s characters don’t say much anymore. Or, more accurately, they don’t say much with their mouths. Instead, they leave their talking to these little flurries of movements, bursts of character and life, revealed in the most mundane actions.

No surprise that Pitt – and Ad Astra – are receiving such acclaim. Indiewire calls the film an “interstellar masterpiece”; The Guardian, “an extraordinary picture”. Moreover, every one of the reviews have singled out Pitt for extra praise, with The Telegraph calling him “grippingly inward”. Of course, we’re still months away from the Oscars, but already the Best Actor nomination seems like a given; not only a reward for the subtle, nuanced work he has done in Gray’s sci-fi epic, but that he has done over the last 10 years.

Over that decade, Pitt’s focus has only been drawn closer inward; his movements have only grown subtler. Cliff Booth, the roguish stuntman Pitt plays in Once Upon A Time, is a defeated ghost; a remnant of a defunct system who hasn’t quite come to terms with the fact that the world no longer needs him. So is Jesse James, the doomed, sad-eyed bandit that Pitt brought to life for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. These men don’t announce themselves with what they say. They lurk in the shadows, taking it all in.

In fact, one of the great delights of modern cinema is watching Brad Pitt watching something. Towards the end of Moneyball, the defeated Billy Beane is shown a brief clip of a baseball game by his friend and colleague Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Pitt, as Beane, stares at a tiny screen, his whole face filling ours. He doesn’t say anything. At first, he doesn’t appear to be reacting at all. Then, something shifts. His eyes amble through desperation, then self-pity, then ecstatic mirth. The whole world passes through his face.

And then it’s over. He slaps his thighs, smiles a little, and gets on with the scene. Nothing’s happened, really. But because it’s Brad Pitt, everything has.

(All images: 20th Century Fox)

—

See Ad Astra in cinemas from September 19.