Brad Pitt – Tim Gee's Blog

James Gray’s new sprawling, ambitious science fiction epic Ad Astra confounds many initial expectations. The Buzz Lightyear-type sentiment suggested by the title (a literal translation of the Latin phrase is “To the Stars”) seems somewhat ironic, given that a pall of something like existential dread seems to hang over the film’s events and is the abiding impression left afterwards, even if the main existential crisis is ultimately resolved. The film sits neatly alongside other recent sci-fi epics such as Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), also concerned with profound questions of human destiny confronted with a vast, timeless and indifferent universe. Ad Astra also shares a cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, with the latter film, which accounts for its familiar, often arresting visual style, and evocative rendering of landscapes and spacescapes far beyond Earth.

The film’s setting is an indeterminate “near future” where the scarcity of resources has bequeathed a fraught era of global conflict that seemingly leaves no quarter of the solar system untouched, even the lunar surface itself. This conflict, with its attendant lawlessness, would be bad enough, but the film’s immediate existential threat comes in the form of massive power surges thought to emanate from the mysterious Lima Project, a mission attempting to locate intelligent life beyond Earth. The mission and its crew disappeared without trace 16 years previously in orbit around Neptune, and its commanding officer, the revered astronaut H Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) was thought to be long dead, until new evidence suggests that he has not only survived but may well now be the instigator of the mysterious power surges. McBride’s son, Roy (Brad Pitt) is also an accomplished astronaut who narrowly survives a fall from a giant space antenna caused by one of the power surges and is consequently tapped by SpaceCom to attempt to communicate and reason with his father and thereby head off the looming apocalypse.

However, ironically for a film whose chief protagonist is an emotionally distant astronaut, searching for a similarly impaired father, Gray’s screenplay also keeps us, the audience, at arm’s length. Pitt’s McBride is a driven, single-minded, solitary figure, whose resting pulse rate, we are told early on, never rises above 80. Clearly, he is meant to exude the kind of “right stuff” always portrayed as the NASA ideal: calm, rational, unflappable, superbly trained even in such esoteric skills as zero gravity hand-to-hand combat. But his singular resolve has obvious negative ramifications for his personal relationships; his estranged wife (Liv Tyler in a fleeting, thankless, virtually non-speaking role) is the principal wronged party in this regard. Pitt’s is a curiously bloodless performance; the only real insights we are afforded into his inner life come in the form of his narration of regular psychological evaluations rendered in a flat, dispassionate monotone. And as such, the film asks a great deal of the audience’s suspension of disbelief, even more so than most similarly themed sci-fi epics. We are asked to believe that McBride is able to stow away in clandestine fashion on board a mission to Neptune that seems strangely devoid of basic security measures, even in an overriding atmosphere of global tension. McBride’s unauthorised presence on the Neptune mission also results, somewhat mysteriously, in the death of the entire crew, an outcome for which McBride expresses remorse but only briefly, and for which he seemingly suffers no adverse consequences after his (very) unlikely return to Earth. Ah well, omelettes and eggs, or so we are apparently meant to assume.

Certainly no one could accuse Gray’s film of lacking ambition, normally no bad thing in a modern cinema environment characterised by formulaic conservatism. It purports to tell an intimate, personal tale of father /son estrangement and (possible) reconciliation, set against a backdrop of interplanetary adventure and existential crisis. The ever-present problem with this kind of ambitious science fiction epic is that it falls between stools: either there is too much windy exposition, of which the most egregious example would be The Matrix trilogy, or not nearly enough, as would seem to be the case in Ad Astra. Whilst never failing to be visually engaging and often spectacular, Ad Astra is nonetheless an austere cinematic experience. The absence of any real emotional resonance, and the presence of so many elements that are dubious and enigmatic, ultimately weighs down and undermines the screenplay long before the end.

Quentin Tarantino’s 9^th and most recent film, One Upon a Time in Hollywood, has been received rapturously by many critics, with more than a few hailing it a ‘masterpiece’. This reaction is best understood when one considers that few subjects are guaranteed to absorb and transfix Hollywood more than…itself. Also, in our current Trumpian binary moment, where hyperbole has never been more rampant, it seems that the reaction to any cultural artifact oscillates between the contrary poles of scathing denunciation and lavish, effusive disproportionate praise with nothing much in between. Since his 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has achieved an iconic status in modern cinema, and spawned a legion of imitators. (To mention just one among many, the makers of last year’s Bad Times at the El Royale must certainly owe him royalties.) Surely no contemporary filmmaker has such a rich and highly developed film vocabulary, spanning a diverse spectrum of influences from Akira Kurosawa to David Lynch, Sergio Leone to Brian de Palma among many. Indeed, one is moved to suspect that his many obvious sources of inspiration serve to distract many highbrow critics from what has always seemed to me his primary influence: Chuck Jones of “Merrie Melodies” fame.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood certainly exhibits all of the cinematic trademarks that Tarantino has refined and deployed continually over the past quarter of a century, and for all its flaws it remains immensely watchable for much of its considerable length, at least until the screenplay falls apart horribly at the film’s denouement. In many ways the film serves as a companion piece to Tarantino’s earlier works Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds. Like them, it imagines a universe somewhat adjacent to reality but only tangentially related to it. The film’s title alerts the audience to its intentions; it is ultimately a (very) violent revenge fantasy deliberately set in a period that would become a cultural touchstone in the America of 1969, that being Hollywood in the months leading up to the notorious Manson ‘family’ murders of, most notably, the actress Sharon Tate, pregnant wife of the director Roman Polanski.

Tarantino’s film is also an evocation of the Hollywood, and by extension the America, of the late 1960s, and a lament for its passing. The hydra-headed assault of forces such as Vietnam and the counterculture (whose dark underbelly is personified by Manson and his murderous acolytes) meant that this was an era of profound and rapid change. Tarantino’s is a wistful and largely affectionate portrayal of the decline of an age of baby boomer optimism and unrestrained masculinity. This conflict is personified by the two fictional protagonists: Rick Dalton (Leonardo de Caprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who are turned into accidental heroes by the happenstance that places Dalton as a next-door neighbour to Polanski and Tate. Dalton is an alcoholic, middle-aged actor, formerly a leading man in the kind of cowboy and war films that were the once the staple of Hollywood, now desperately trying to hang on to the threadbare remnants of his career by taking demeaning “villain of the week” guest roles in television series. Booth is Dalton’s erstwhile stunt double and one-man entourage, and where Dalton comes across as a singular study in angst and self-loathing, Booth is much more of an insouciant, knockabout free spirit, although Tarantino hints at a darker hinterland for him by having other characters give voice to the rumour that he once killed his wife. This is yet another characteristic of a Tarantino screenplay, conveying if not quite benign acceptance of, at least indifference towards, casual sexism and misogyny. Booth’s wife-killing past is little more than an aside and is never explored in any detail; seemingly its only purpose in the narrative is to help prepare us for Booth’s pivotal role in the final spasm of graphic, cartoonish violence. Even the character of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is given precious little to do by Tarantino other than wander through the film in a kind of dreamy disengagement. Tarantino’s alternative universe does spare her the grisly fate that reality had in store for her, but she is nonetheless less of a fully-fledged character than an avatar in a video game.

For me at least, the overall impression is of a film that has many interesting elements but nevertheless still manages to be less than the sum of its parts, a not uncommon reaction, at least on my part, to a Tarantino film. Having watched more than a few of his films one is very aware of the filmmakers and cinema traditions that he admires and that have left their stamp on him; what seems far less certain is what unique, individual vision, if any, he brings to the craft. Watching a film like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, one can’t fail to be to be impressed by the mastery of form in evidence and the skillful and painstaking evocation of time and place. But one is left to wonder: what, exactly, is the point? By having his fictional characters intersect with, and inhabit the same universe as real-life characters such as Manson and Tate, what is Tarantino trying to achieve beyond providing a fanciful vehicle for his typical adolescent revenge fantasy? There is no other plot as such, other than the apparent inevitability of Dalton’s career decline and the consequent cooling of his relationship with Booth, but this serves as little more than prelude to the final, violent culmination. For by no means the first time in the Tarantino oeuvre, the graphic and grisly violence of the finale has a cartoonish quality, and the heavy-handed post-modern irony that is a Tarantino trademark means that the audience is uncertain of whether to recoil, laugh or perhaps do both.

One can’t help but speculate that a more satisfying, thoughtful film might have eschewed the absurdity of the ‘alternative history’ and concerned itself more with the reaction of Dalton, Booth and Hollywood in a larger sense to the real-life events of August 1969. But nuance, and an affinity for reflection, have never been in much evidence in Tarantino’s career hitherto. We are told that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood may be Tarantino’s penultimate film, as he has stated more than once his intention to make 10 films and then retire. It seems that those of us waiting for this prodigiously gifted filmmaker to produce his definitive masterpiece, with a unique distinctive vision, may be destined for disappointment. Despite the breathless hype, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood does not appear to me to be that film.