Brad Pitt's shallow turn to stoic masculinity leaves his talent behind

Even his work for Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, clearly celebratory of Pitt’s masculine bravado, complicates any sense of pure glorification: His stuntman Cliff Booth, whom he’s about to reprise for a years-later sequel, is a likable scrub. He lives in a trailer, cooks himself boxed mac and cheese, does odd jobs, and upon recalling the fight with Bruce Lee that got him kicked off a studio lot, he can only shrug and offer a self-amused “fair enough.” He’s also so confident in his masculinity, in his middle-aged shirtlessness and his lot in life, that those moments of showboating—fighting Bruce Lee, taking on the Manson gang—only happen in short bursts between his laconic observations. 

Pitt won an Oscar for the film, which was, in many ways, the culmination of a decade-plus of work that seemed to be done without much concern for box office glory. Doubtless there were certain commercial calculations at play, but Pitt appeared to use his most blatantly mainstream films like World War Z to keep his line of credit going for tough, well-honed movies like Killing Them Softly. What, then, to make of the subsequent and fairly dire planes/trains/automobiles trilogy of Heart Of The Beast, Bullet Train, and F1? They’re watchable, and yes, F1 was nominated for Best Picture. But besides placing Pitt on a series of vehicles, the main thing they have in common is an oppressive self-consciousness about what a quietly macho guy Pitt can be. Rather than emboldening him, his Oscar seems to have convinced him that his best is no longer necessary.

It’s not that Pitt isn’t up to the task of playing a haunted, taciturn, dog-loving military man in Heart Of The Beast. He’s convincing enough to fudge the fact that his character would have been pretty old for active duty in the 2000s-era Middle East conflicts, and he’s charismatic enough to hold the screen for the extended periods where it’s just him and a dog. (The dog isn’t acting, per se, but has some built-in expressiveness that makes him a surprisingly strong scene partner.) But at his age, even playing a character who suffers some pretty intense physical setbacks, assuming a tough stoicism feels a little more like cosplay than acting. When he recalls shooting an enemy combatant in the head as payback for injuring his dog, Pitt doesn’t add much dimension to the recollection. Throughout the film, he seems mournful primarily about the fact that his dog has been through hell on the battlefield, conveyed with a tone that vaguely implies that the dog nobly volunteered for duty. A better movie might have drawn a subtle connection to the simultaneous dehumanization of war and humanization of our animal friends. But whenever the movie strays beyond the mechanics of survival, Ayer and Pitt keep it squarely in Support The Troops mode. 

If this were a one-off, the way that Pitt’s previous Ayer movie Fury seemed vaguely anomalous back in 2014, it might be easy enough to dismiss as something that interests Pitt without necessarily challenging him. Plenty of actors have those little hang-ups, and on the Ayer scale of violent machismo, Heart Of The Beast practically qualifies as gentle. Pitt, though, has apparently decided to make movies and non-characters like this a bigger part of his star persona. F1 in particular plays like an I-want-one-too vehicle of middle-age reaffirmation in the vein of Top Gun: Maverick, right down to poaching that film’s ultra-efficient technician-director Joseph Kosinski to showcase an aging star proving that he’s still the best in the biz. 

Whatever you think of Maverick or Tom Cruise, that movie draws upon the cultural memory of the original Top Gun. F1, on the other hand, seems nostalgic for a Brad Pitt who never really existed—for an idea of the star as a paragon of professional but stubbornly individualistic masculinity. GQ Pitt and Esquire Pitt, maybe, but not movie Pitt, like a version of his Cliff Booth scrubbed of the nastiness and moral ambiguity. Similarly, the kind of easy shorthand Pitt seeks in Heart Of The Beast seems to refer to a combination of his work in the World War II movies Inglourious Basterds (which ultimately downplays his badassery) and Fury (which plays it way up). Then there’s Bullet Train and Wolfs, Pitt’s already-forgotten streaming re-team with Clooney, which take an even more piffling approach to putting Pitt back in action. But they still focus intently on Pitt as a singular and unusually badass man, with all the dimensionality of a cameo where he plays himself, somehow distended to feature-length. (Perhaps not coincidentally, he does have cameos in The Lost City and Deadpool 2, albeit not quite playing himself.) 

Given what’s been made public about Pitt’s personal life, it’s difficult to avoid reading Pitt’s recent professional choices as something happening in concert with his blemished image, maybe even because of it. The public, plainly, seems not to care much (or, perhaps, know much) about the allegations that Pitt abused two of his children as well as Jolie. Pitt himself, though, must understand the potential for him to wind up closer to Mel Gibson or Johnny Depp (who, despite various efforts to whitewash or ignore various misdeeds, haven’t been able to hold on to the same cachet) than, say, Tom Cruise (who still commands A-list projects). Pitt’s recent work feels like an actor playing defense, and with far less go-for-broke conviction than someone like Cruise has shown in order to half-justify his messianic impulses.

Pitt has never positioned himself as quite so superhuman. Though he may not have a signature character as wrenchingly emotive as Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey from Magnolia, he sometimes affects a Robert Redford-like combination of sensitivity and pointed callowness, befitting his early work with the man himself on A River Runs Through It. Where his best performances might actually outdo Redford is his depiction of half-sublimated male rage, his new movies feel like the product of belatedly deciding that maybe it’s better to finish the job of sublimating that toxicity, lest its emergence draw uncomfortable parallels to Pitt’s real life. Hence no more bullying, dissatisfied father types as in Tree Of Life, or damaged-goods son types as in Ad Astra. It’s better, apparently, to associate his masculinity—and any detestable real-life decisions it may involve—with military-grade stoicism or last-athlete-standing individuality. 

It’s also possible that Pitt is simply and cynically acknowledging the end of his road as a more actorly brand of movie star, something not many stars can much afford these days—quite literally, given that Pitt’s last really strong performance, in the death-and-rebirth-of-Hollywood epic Babylon, was a spectacular box office flop. In that film, Pitt’s Jack Conrad is a silent-film star who makes a go of maintaining his lofty position in a post-talkie world, only to meet with bad reviews and fading audience interest. Not consoled by a gossip columnist’s argument that while his time is over, he will achieve a form of immortality through the work that has already been done, a despondent Jack eventually dies by suicide. 

Nothing so drastic awaits the real Pitt. It’s an underrated aspect of Hollywood’s age-defiance habit; actors are no longer expected to retire or simply see the work dry up when they hit 50. It may be that the second Cliff Booth movie will put Pitt back in touch with a sense of human frailty alongside his barely diminished ability to look cool as hell. If not, maybe another movie will; his near-peer Cruise is stepping back from the brink of action oblivion with Digger (though F1 seems to have dared him into doing a Days Of Thunder sequel). At the moment, though, Pitt is putting the thinned-out version of his image first, as if he’s realized that he prefers the magazine-profile version of himself over whatever he’s revealed through his best performances.