Brad Pitt: Born to be Brad

Unfortunately the starring roles that followed Thelma were just colored water. If you blinked, you missed the esoteric Johnny Suede, a low-budget character study of a rockabilly charlatan who fancies himself Ricky Nelson but has the emotional sophistication of a fourth grader. Balancing a pompadour bigger than the bow of the Star of Norway, Brad fashioned a Johnny that got high marks from those who managed to see it, all two or three of them. The grand experiment that successfully matched animation with reality in Who Framed Roger Rabbit yielded tepid results in Brad's other summer '92 release, Cool World. "Nobody got out of that film alive," a film industry savant told me recently, "but Brad looked better than anybody else."

"It's hard to be impulsive when you're working with a blue screen," Brad lamented after the film's poor showing. Next came A River Runs Through It, Robert Redford's admirable screen adaptation of the Norman Maclean autobiographical novella on Zen fly fishing and the defective perfection of WASP love. Brad ruminates over the experience of shooting River up in the land of Thomas McGuane and Custer's Last Stand.

"Where'd you grow up?" he asks, that covert Missouri accent whispering like a panhandle wind through a woodpile.

"Wisconsin . . . southern Wisconsin."

"Was it a fighting town? Yeah? Montana's a fighting town. It's almost a sport--horror sport." Brad falls silent for a moment at the prospect of saying much more about the movie that has undeniably upped the ante in the career that Thelma created. He is, by turns, vigilant and eager, as if some exotic creature had stepped unwittingly close and the fear of frightening it away could not outweigh the joy of seeing it face-to-face. The ease with which he demystifies his performance in River is startling. "Well, of my part, there could've been more underneath, in my opinion. Little more back-story, maybe. But there's no getting around it. Redford did a fantastic job crafting that film, shaping it into chiseled granite. A film adapted from a book's got to take its own form--Redford did that." Then, cupping his hands behind his head, he settles into the imaginary darkness and adds, "It's an afternoon movie. Can't go see it in a big crowd. You gotta see it in the warmth of the afternoon."

There is no denying Brad's vexation when he mutters the phrase Golden Boy. The idea of being knighted as filmdom's next Favorite Son clearly troubles him, trails him around like a bright yellow balloon. "I don't want people to think I'm the next anything," he says. We are all, by nature, slow to admit that there might be something we don't know about the terms routinely used to define our lives. Golden Boy is as much a part of Brad Pitt as his blue eyes and which hand he uses to eat, but he's intent on stretching the limits of his identity to a point just short of time travel. Now that he has a place in Young Hollywood, he wants his own place.

"Young Hollywood," Brad picks up the thread. "What a nightmare."

"You fit right in, dude."

"Yeah, that's me." He hunkers down, shucking off the teasing. "Naw, it'll turn around. It's a trend, Young Hollywood. I think it's sidetracked right now. It's a night at Roxbury, fighting the woes of personal hygiene. Just cool for cool's sake. That's okay. It's gonna turn around."

"To what?"

"Well, don't you wonder where the young Pacinos, the young De Niros, the young Walkens, the young Duvalls, the young Newmans, the young Redfords are? Who do we have now that's young and inspiring? Sean took a break. Don't get me wrong, there are a few. But not enough. We got Oldman, and he's not that young, really. River's good. Juliette is one. Dermot Mulroney. There's Elias Koteas. He's great."

"What's he been in?"

"See, that's exactly what I'm saying. Someone get him, use him right. I don't know. Someone bring Sean Penn back. It's just gotta come back around. I wanna see that collection of young guys get strong. I'd like to be inspired again. Let's see some intelligence. I don't see a lot of intelligence with the young people, you know?"

The possibility exists that Young Hollywood, rather than lacking smarts, has simply been trying to keep from dying of thirst. Today a studio head is just a canary in a coal mine. In an atmosphere of two strikes and you're out, taking a job as a studio chief ranks right up there with Castro's food taster, or the poor slob who mops up the stuff that's glowing. The delectable irony of William Goldman's famous quote, "In Hollywood, nobody knows anything," is that it has never rung more true--and for reasons not remotely related to the spirit in which it was intended. Where's the material for young actors?

"No one expected River to do well at the box office," says Brad. "Redford's proved that you can elevate film. So, yeah, it's partly material. It's also partly the people making the movies. But you gotta take responsibility for yourself, eventually. What kind of choices are you willing to make or not make? Sure, it's tough in this climate to make films. But that's the challenge of it. You want it to be easy? No. Then you get bored. Look, everyone's got their battles. It's a good thing. But there's dangers in every category. You just gotta watch out for the dangers."

And the dangers, judging by the continuing proliferation of 12-step programs, are not limited to keeping your distance from leading ladies who are 'toons and first-time directors who carry handguns.

"I've seen a lot of young actors go through that," says Brad, referring to the enticement of drugs and the subsequent mental torture of recovery for those who think seeing the world through the diffraction of youth is not somehow destabilizing enough. "They think they'll lose their creativity going straight. So many people--I even had the notion that you had to be miserable to be great. But then you gotta say, well why does everyone either die from drugs, or quit? So how good can it be? Very simple question. Very tough answer. I don't trust drugs."

Brad excuses himself for a moment and disappears down a hall to the kitchen. I am left to contemplate the condition of one of the vinyl chairs. It has a perfect tear across its seat, as though the same clothing-designer Zorro who opened Hollywood's jeans at the knees, booty and crotch tried his luck with furniture. The sound of something akin to the hollow saliva hiss of a jet engine spirals its way down the hall from the kitchen. When Brad returns he has a cup of coffee with a suspicious foamy top to it.

"Got yourself an espresso machine in there, don't you, Brad?"

"Yeah, but I don't know quite how to use it right. But I get coffee from it." He savors his cup with a deep, affirmative farm-kitchen sigh. I tell him he sounds as though the peak of his content could not be surpassed 10 minutes or 10 years from this instant.

"So you're talking about little perfect moments. Don't have many, but that's what keeps you going," he grins. "Because they're all over the place, just hard to find. There's this bag for perfect moments that you carry around with you. And then when you find them, occasionally, and add to the bag, you really appreciate it. That's all right with me--that settles well with me." Stevie Ray Vaughan's live version of "Tin Pan Alley" haunts the stereo speakers now. "I'll tell you what's not all right, though," Brad says. "It's a shame that Stevie's gone. To me, he's it, he's everything. This is a great song. A great song."

Rhapsodizing over the music now, Brad winces his way up the wet, redolent scales Stevie plucks out of his choral stream. "So, you meet people every week, try and find something interesting about them, right?" he says with a wink. I turn the question around on him: Why, I ask, can't we get enough of movie stars? Why do we, as otherwise rational and outwardly sane folk, commune with Liz Smith's column each morning the way paramedics check vital signs?

"Well, I don't know," Brad hedges, in his way of beginning a thought with a rising moan, as if he's shy at the idea of being an authority on anything. "I'm all for showing the pictures, showing he's still alive, couple of words about what he's doing, then hit the checkout line. But you drive around in small towns, see people's lives, there's almost a . . . I don't know--they want more, there's some of that--but there's also the notion that they think maybe they could run into someone who might understand who they are." Here Brad turns the questioning back on me. "What would you do if you had to do something else?"

I tell him that over in that alternate universe containing the other half of the table in his living room, I am eternally happy calling fair or foul as a baseball umpire.

"STRRRIKKE ONE!" Brad jerks his thumb. "Hey, there're a million things to be and do--you just gotta get out and do them. People get too concerned about the damn money. People limit themselves too much, man. There's a million things to do. There really are." Outside, the sky looks as if it's been wiped by a filmy rag. Inside, Brad Pitt ties a rustler's scarf around his forehead and talks about vacation time, leaving town. "I'm just now getting into the opportunity to make some decent money. Any money I've come into up to now I've put into land, so I'm pretty much broke."

There are also worse things to be than a matinee idol. The Rebel can do no wrong, since rules are for others to follow. He changes for no one, clings to the cloak of his nonconformity like a life jacket. He charms his own life. The Golden Boy, alas, is born into an existing world. At 29, Brad has the talent and physical graces to wade into a wide range of roles--tough guys, loverboys, loners, family men. He could be at home sobbing in the middle of a French Quarter back street or debonairly hanging from a chin on Mount Rushmore. It will ultimately come down to what he correctly identified before as "his deal." Like the narrator in "Tin Pan Alley," he seems intent on stepping over the threshold of unleavened danger to test his will to come back. But, devoted as he is to maintaining his balance, renouncing his Golden Boy bloodline would seem about as logical as beating on a snare drum with a couple of long-stem roses. Still, if uneasy lies the head, then the head keeps moving.

"I'm taking off Thursday morning," Brad stretches out, "just gonna go driving for two weeks, then end up home for the holidays. Gonna travel for a while, then do a project called Forget Me Not, with John Malkovich."

"Gotta break that psycho-killer mold next, huh?"

"Fah fah fah fah," Brad chuckles, humming the lyrics to the old Talking Heads number. "So what's the catchy title for this? They always put such cheesy titles on these pieces."

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Michael Angeli interviewed Judy Davis for our October issue.

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