Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Liv Tyler, Donnie Keshawarz, Sean Blakemore, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, John Finn, John Ortiz. Screenplay: James Gray, Ethan Gross. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Max Richter.

It's said that there are really only two types of sci-fi movies: space Westerns and mind-bogglers. The Star Wars canon would be the archetype of the former, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) of the latter. But James Gray seems to want to bridge the types in Ad Astra, with some exciting action sequences in the first half of the film, including a spectacular fall by the protagonist, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), from a space station near enough to the Earth for him to be affected by gravity, and an exciting chase sequence involving moon pirates. But then the film shifts into something more mythic, a father-son fable with overtones of Oedipus and Laius, Daedalus and Icarus, Orestes and Agamemnon, Abraham and Isaac, and so on. It goes from action to introspection so suddenly that it lost a lot of its audience, who may have gone in expecting something like Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) and found themselves watching something more like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), and not just because Pitt sometimes seems to be reprising his character from the Malick film. Gray also makes nods to the Kubrick classic, with some wry twists: In 2001, for example, space flight has been commercialized, so that people travel to the moon on Pan Am (an airline that went out of business before the real 2001 rolled around). In Ad Astra, the moon flight is on Virgin, and Gray slips in a dig at today's commercial aviation when Roy requests a blanket and pillow and is told that the charge for them is $125. Earthlike crime and corruption have also infected travel in space: Not only are there pirates on the moon, the international competition for mineral rights has bred distrust. The American program has been militarized, with the usual consequences of rank-pulling and official secrecy screwing things up. Pitt carries the film as he has never carried one before, having developed a gift for revealing the internal torment carefully masked by external stoicism. I have a feeling that Ad Astra, though reckoned a bit of a box office disappointment at the time, is going to grow in stature over the years, along with Gray's reputation as a director.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Rafal Zawierucha, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Kurt Russell. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Fred Raskin.

With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino proves himself to be perhaps the most superficial of our major filmmakers. I mean that as a compliment, recalling Oscar Wilde's remark, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." Tarantino exerts a lot of effort getting things right so he can get them wrong. He meticulously re-creates the Hollywood of the late 1960s just so he can change history. And so, Sharon Tate is not murdered by the Manson family. Instead, Tex and Squeaky and Sadie are done in by the fictional Cliff Booth, Francesca Capucci, and Rick Dalton, the last incinerating Squeaky with a flamethrower -- perhaps the only "Chekhov's flamethrower" in the history of movies, its existence and Dalton's prowess with it having been established earlier in the film. Tarantino did this kind of rewriting history before, in Inglourious Basterds (2009), but without the kind of luxuriating in upending our knowledge of things the way he does here. Like almost all of his other films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a revenge fantasy, though here the revenge is the audience's: We get our gratification from revenge upon actuality, from seeing Sharon Tate spared a horrible death. But despite the violent outcome, this is also one of Tarantino's least violent films as well as one of his least flamboyant (perhaps owing to the absence of his signature actor, Samuel L. Jackson). It comes off eventually as a kind of homage to one of the film and TV industry's least honored periods: that late-'60s era, before the emergence of film brats like Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese gave a new direction to movies, a macho time filled with spaghetti Westerns, James Bond ripoffs like the "Matt Helm" series, and private eye shows like "Mannix," when fading stars like Rick Dalton were scrounging for whatever work they could land. Tarantino himself was a small child then, so his re-creation of the period is, like most of his oeuvre, drawn more from movies than from memory. Still, he knows how to create characters and write dialogue, and how to cast actors who can play and speak both. It won a well-deserved supporting actor Oscar for Brad Pitt, whose role seems to me at least as large as that of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated as best actor but didn't win. 

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Jessica Chastain, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt
in The Tree of Life

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Fuselier, Nicolas Gonda, Will Wallace, Kelly Koonce. Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I disliked The Tree of Life when I first saw it, finding it pretentious and overblown. Seeing it now, I can appreciate that there's a great movie tucked in among the pretentiousness, the reaching after some kind of metaphysical or theological statement. There's a gentle, subtle portrait of growing up in the film, somewhat akin to Richard Linklater's Boyhood (2014). I only wish that Terrence Malick had left the theology to the theologians, because what is overlaid on the story of the O'Brien boys and their parents is a muddle of cosmology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and a New-Agey view of the oneness of all life. Critically, the film was a huge success, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, getting three Oscar nominations (including one for best picture), and making several lists of the best films of the 21st century. It also features one of Brad Pitt's best performances, as the strict but loving father who suffers from disillusionment at the course his life has taken. I just wish more time had been spent on the backstory of Jessica Chastain's character, which is seen mostly from the rather Oedipal point of view of Jack, the oldest son who grows up to be Sean Penn. This is a very male-heavy movie. 

Burn After Reading (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2008)

George Clooney in Burn After Reading

Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rasche, J.K. Simmons, Oleg Krupa. Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Music: Carter Burwell.

One of the Coen Brothers' goofy dark comedies, and perhaps the darkest if not the goofiest, with a couple of fatalities that tend to take the levity out of the film. Mostly it's a showcase for the comic skills of some usually serious actors, with Brad Pitt the standout as Chad, an addle-brained employee of a gym who happens upon a disc that he thinks is full of government secrets he can sell to its owner for a reward. It doesn't work out well for him or anyone else. This is the Coens at their chilliest, with no one you much want to root for.

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Norton in Fight Club

The Narrator: Edward Norton
Tyler Durden: Brad Pitt
Marla Singer: Helena Bonham Carter
Bob Paulson: Meat Loaf
Richard Chesler: Zach Grenier
The Mechanic: Holt McCallany
Angel Face: Jared Leto

Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Jim Uhls
Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth
Production design: Alex McDowell
Film editing: James Haygood
Music: Dust Brothers

What if Dr. Jekyll didn't know he was turning into Mr. Hyde? Fight Club is essentially an exploration of that premise, turning Robert Louis Stevenson's sci-fi into psy-fi, a fiction based on a fantastical psychological premise. But Chuck Palahniuk's novel, and the adaptation of it by screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher, is more than that: It's also a satire on corporate commercialism and the grip it has on the soul -- particularly the male soul. The Narrator is a nebbishy corporate everyman, stuck in a job he hates, doing work that morally revolts him -- he calculates whether an auto manufacturer can get away with dangerously defective parts, whether a recall will be more expensive than paying off accident victims. He's insomniac, and finds that he can sleep only when he goes to support groups for people worse off than he is, sufferers from serious illnesses. At one session he meets Marla Singer, beautiful and frazzled, who also goes to these support groups because she wants to feel something that she can't find in her own routine life. Then on a business trip, during which the venality of his job becomes particularly clear to him, he meets a devil-may-care type named Tyler Durden, handsome, clever, and completely amoral. Returning from the trip he arrives to find that his apartment, the only thing he feels some pride in, has been blown up in what seems to be an accidental explosion. He has no place to go, so when he finds Durden's card, he moves in with him in a dreadful rundown old house on the edge of nowhere, and becomes drawn into Durden's life, including the formation of the titular club, in which men of various professions gather to beat one another silly. It's the ultimate catharsis for meaningless corporate drudgery. He also introduces Durden to Marla, and lies in his bed listening to the two of them having raucously noisy sex. Eventually, the sex and violence escalate, and when they reach the pinnacle of rebelliousness against establishment values, the Narrator has a revelation: He's Tyler Durden. Fincher beautifully finesses any literal-minded explanations, relying instead on Edward Norton's ordinariness and Brad Pitt's good looks, as well as some careful staging and cutting, to keep from turning this into a tale about dissociative identity disorder. Instead, it's a fable about the ordinary male's repressed desire to become a Brad Pitt, or as Durden puts it, "All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not." The first viewers of Fight Club were often distracted by the violence and failed to respond to the ideas the film is working with. Since then, it has grown in esteem, perhaps because its violence has become more routine in movies, but also because its apocalyptic ending irrupted into real life on Sept. 11, 2001. The film's power to provoke, to appall, and to stimulate argument makes it some kind of minor classic.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Both the title and the film are overlong, but it's hard to see how either of them could have been trimmed. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a lingering, subtle meditation on the nature of celebrity set in an era long before the arrival of social media thrust celebrities like Donald Trump into our daily lives. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck give memorable performances in their respective title roles -- Affleck received a supporting actor Oscar nomination, although his role is surely larger than Pitt's -- and they're well supported by Sam Shepard as Frank James, Mary-Louise Parker in the thankless role of Jesse's wife, Sam Rockwell as Robert Ford's brother Charley, and Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, and Paul Schneider as various ill-fated members of the James gang. There's also a cameo by former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville as the governor of Missouri who precipitates the assassination. It was only the second feature directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik, who wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Ron Hansen. There's a bit too much lyric profundity in the screenplay, as in the voiceover by the narrator (Hugh Ross), who tells us about Jesse James: "Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified." That's a hard description for any actor to live up to, but Pitt does a good job of it in perhaps the best performance of his career. Since the title pretty much gives the plot away, the film wisely concentrates on exploring the characters of James and Ford, who meet when the latter joins the James gang for a train robbery in Blue Cut, Missouri. Ford has worshiped James since boyhood, and in one splendid scene James taunts and teases him into revealing the depths of his infatuation. Ford has memorized everything that could possibly link him to James: They both have brothers whose names contain six letters, for example. This is homoerotic hero-worship at its most intense -- and eventually, most deadly. The movie was filmed in Canada, with superb, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Roger Deakins. The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Cave himself plays the saloon singer who taunts Ford with "The Ballad of Jesse James," which refers to "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard" (James's pseudonym).

The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015)

Christian Bale in The Big Short

I will never come closer to understanding Wall Street than I do after watching this film -- but that's about as close as I am to understanding particle physics. It's a remarkable portrayal of what the kind of manipulations that led to the crash of 2008 can do to people, and in this case to the people who helped bring it about. I have seen what that crash -- and the manipulations -- can do to ordinary folk: I live in a condo that's part of a series of small duplexes, each unit of which is only a little over a thousand square feet. A few years before the crash, the unit that adjoined mine was bought by a Mexican-American man who worked as a gardener at Stanford. It was, he explained, a starter home for him and his wife and five (!) daughters. It was soon evident that he was having trouble making the payments on the mortgage -- at one point, the family moved out and rented it to someone else for a while. Eventually, the bank foreclosed. I wondered at the time how he had managed to secure a mortgage in the first place. After the crash, I found out why -- a process that is at the heart of what takes place in The Big Short. There are no heroes or villains in this movie: Even the protagonists with whom we are asked to identify, such as Michael Burry (Christian Bale) and Mark Baum (Steve Carell), are out to milk a system they know is corrupt. And when they fail, they still manage to make a billion dollars, mostly by using other people's money. But the characters are so shrewdly drawn, first by Michael Lewis in his book and then by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph in their Oscar-winning screenplay, and so deftly acted that we can't help feeling for them. Some of them, like Burry and Baum and Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt in one of his best performances), seem to have a touch of Asperger's. Movies like Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) and The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) have given us portrayals of America's financial system as dominated by flamboyant greed-heads like Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort, but The Big Short shows us something even more disturbing: the moral corruption of exceptionally intelligent men whose lives could have been put to something more useful than playing with money as if it were a board game with no real consequences to other people.

Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006)

I want to watch a movie about the calamity that befalls a Moroccan family when they acquire a rifle to shoot the jackals that prey on their herd of goats. Or a movie about a nanny for a well-to-do San Diego couple who unwisely decides to take her employers' small children with her when she goes to her son's wedding in Mexico. Or a movie about a deaf Japanese teenager who suffers from sexual confusion in the aftermath of her mother's suicide. But I don't want to watch them all at once, which is what Babel forces us to do. It's a terrifically ambitious film, with some stunning location work in four widespread countries, and it has some great performances, particularly by Oscar nominees Adriana Barraza as the nanny and Rinko Kikuchi as the teenager. It probably deserved the nominations for best picture and for González Iñárritu's direction, too. (It won for Gustavo Santaolalla's score.) But intercutting the three stories mentioned above and centering them on the plight of the San Diego couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) severely reduces their dramatic force and interest. Why, I wonder, were Pitt's and Blanchett's characters on a bus tour of Morocco with a bunch of rather unpleasant Brits? If, as the movie seems to suggest, it's to work on their relationship after their loss of a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it's a very odd choice indeed. Their movie-star presence also skews the film away from the performances of the less well-known international stars. Structurally, the Japanese story seems poorly integrated: Its only link to the other stories is that the rifle that turns up in Morocco was originally owned by the Japanese girl's father. What struck me as strongest about the movie was its subtext: the bureaucratic paralysis of the American superpower in the wake of 9/11. Pitt and Blanchett are unable to get the help they need in Morocco because of the paranoia about Islamic terrorism that forces an unwanted and unnecessary caution on the U.S. State Department. American immigration policy also prevents a sensible resolution to the problem of the nanny and the children. Babel is certainly not without its rewards, but a scaling-back of its ambitions might have produced a better movie -- or maybe three or four of them.