By The Sea

Film (2015)

With Angelina Jolie Pitt (Vanessa), Brad Pitt (Roland), Michel (Niels Arestrup), Melanie Laurent (Lea), Melvil Poupaud (François)

An American writer (Brad Pitt) and his wife (Angelina Jolie Pitt) show up for an extended stay in a French fishing village so he can finish his novel. Next door to them in their hotel is a young, newly married couple, Lea (Melanie Laurent) and François (Melvil Poupaud).

Experiencing grave problems in their own marriage despite what seems like committed love between them, the older couple spy upon the young couple, engaging them as a way of dealing with their own issues. In between collaborating with his sullen wife on these weirdly probing excursions, the writer goes a lot to a bar to try to write but mostly to drink and to talk with the engaging proprietor Michel (Niels Arestrup) a lot.

Some good actors have found enhanced careers as writers and directors.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon did a great job writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997) and Affleck did a good job more recently as co-writer and director of The Town (2010) and as director of Argo (2012). Celebrated French actor Daniel Auteuil recently showed his stuff as writer and director of the totally wonderful The Well Digger’s Daughter (2011). And great American Western star Clint Eastwood has turned out a significant repertoire of films as director, recently with the excellent American Sniper (2014) but most notably with the masterful Unforgiven (1992). The list goes on; it is not unexpected to find actors trying their hands behind the camera.

Angelina Jolie is an outspoken defender of human rights, courageously open about public health, and, in some cases, has shown her stuff as an actress, notably in Girl, Interrupted (1999). But, based on the effort here, I would not recommend she quit her day job, so to speak. This film is really pretty bad.

It would seem that some of the likely models for the film are any of the quietly reflective French mood movies of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) such as My Night at Maude’s (1969) or Claire’s Knee (1970). Those classics effectively explore the subtleties of relationship and sensuality. The current venture represents a dim echo of those kinds of efforts, including French language and mood, but not any of the intensity or insight.

A lot of the fault of the film lies in the writing, which is generally thin. Apart from having a charming setting and some charming characters (Niels Arestrup as Michel, the bar proprietor, is engaging, and Mélanie Laurent as Lea, the young newlywed hotel neighbor is charmingly appealing), there isn’t too much here.

Jolie Pitt and Pitt are, indeed, beautiful people, and the film certainly gives the viewer ample opportunity to appreciate that. There are endless shots of each of them, mostly Jolie Pitt, sitting, looking, languishing. The only problem – or the major problem – with the script is that, with all the looking and languishing one hardly knows why. When one gets a sense, towards the end of the film, of what’s going on with Vanessa, it’s pretty much a weirdly overblown downer and does not really explain any of the psychology involved.

The subject of working through anguish and alienation after many years of marriage is certainly a welcome subject, but this film manages only to point to it without really exposing much of its substance.

With much publicity about Jolie Pitt’s recent surgical history, one might regard the film, which includes a certain amount of nudity, as a kind of meta-correction of what might have been public misperceptions of any effects of that history upon her form. The film effectively reveals, if little else, the integrity and continuing appeal of that form.

The pacing of the film is slow throughout – I was checking my watch from a half-hour in. It is nice to hear the French and curious and somewhat striking to hear Pitt and Jolie Pitt speaking it. With the setting and the cute supporting characters supplementing the story, it’s possible to wade through with some pleasant effects, but the film goes on for a very long two hours and one feels in the end like one has been away a long time and not covered much ground.

– BADMan