Brad Pitt: RANKED
With the release of Heart of the Beast, the new survival movie directed by David Ayer (and, more importantly for me, a wonderful dog movie) I thought this would be a perfect time to look back at the career of Brad Pitt.
In the film, Pitt plays James Belmont, a former Special Forces soldier stranded in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash with his combat dog, Odin, and the movie basically hands the screen over to Pitt, the dog and the wilderness and says, “Okay, go.” And it works. Pitt is terrific in it. The dog is terrific in it. I love dogs, so obviously I was already halfway there.
But watching Pitt in this kind of stripped-down role also reminded me of something that has occasionally gotten lost during his more than 35 years of being one of the most famous people on the planet: Brad Pitt is a really, really good actor.
And I think the reason people sometimes forget that is obvious. Look at the guy.
Brad Pitt is one of those actors whose ridiculous movie-star looks have occasionally worked against the perception of him as an actor. From almost the moment he became famous, he wasn't merely an actor...he was Brad Pitt. Heartthrob. Sex symbol. Tabloid fixture. Half of several enormously famous couples. One of the biggest movie stars in the world.
He dated Juliette Lewis early in his career, married Jennifer Aniston, later had his long and incredibly public relationship and marriage with Angelina Jolie, and for decades there were stretches where you couldn't go through a grocery-store checkout line without seeing his face on three different magazine covers.
All of that stuff became part of the Brad Pitt phenomenon, but it also tended to obscure what was happening in the movies themselves.
Because here's the thing: the pretty boy likes to get weird.
That's always been one of my favorite things about Pitt. Here is a guy who could have spent his entire career standing in flattering light, taking his shirt off, smiling and collecting enormous checks. And, okay, he has certainly done some of that.
But some of his best performances are strange, funny, dark, eccentric and occasionally downright goofy. He'll play an idiot. He'll play a psychopath. He'll make himself ridiculous. He'll disappear into a supporting role. He'll do a bizarre accent. He'll allow another actor to dominate a scene. He'll play a guy who spends most of a movie eating.
And he has repeatedly worked with serious filmmakers: David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis, Andrew Dominik, Terry Gilliam, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and Alejandro González Iñárritu, among many others.
There has always been something much more interesting going on with Pitt than simply being a gigantic movie star.
William Bradley Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1963 and grew up in Springfield, Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri, studying journalism with an emphasis on advertising, but left shortly before graduating and headed to Los Angeles to become an actor.
And like almost everybody who eventually becomes Brad Pitt, he did not arrive in Hollywood and immediately become Brad Pitt. There were odd jobs and tiny parts and television appearances.
He turned up on Growing Pains, Head of the Class and Freddy's Nightmares, among other shows, and there were early movies like The Dark Side of the Sun, Cutting Class and the TV movie Too Young to Die? This was the period where he was working, getting noticed here and there, and waiting for that one thing to happen.
Then Thelma & Louise happened.
You really had to be around in 1991 to understand what Brad Pitt's appearance in Thelma & Louise was like. He plays J.D., the young hitchhiker Geena Davis's Thelma falls for, sleeps with and ultimately discovers has stolen Louise's money.
It isn't a huge role. He's not the star of the movie. But Pitt walks into that film and basically walks straight into movie-star history. He's charming, funny, sexy and dangerous enough to make the character interesting, and, yes, he looks insane. Women went nuts. The press went nuts. Everybody wanted to know who this guy was.
Every once in a while, you see an actor appear in a movie and you can almost watch a star being created in real time. That's Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise. The movie came out, and suddenly he was here.
There were a couple of less interesting movies immediately afterward, including Johnny Suede and Ralph Bakshi's strange live-action/animated Cool World, but Robert Redford cast him in A River Runs Through It in 1992, and that pushed the whole Brad Pitt thing even further.
The comparisons to Redford were inevitable (blond hair, ridiculously handsome, charismatic, natural movie-star presence) and Pitt was very good in the film. Then he started doing the kind of stuff that made me realize there might be considerably more to him than that.
In 1993 he made Kalifornia, a nasty, weird serial-killer movie with Juliette Lewis, David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes, and Pitt is creepy and completely unglamorous in it. That same year he showed up for a small role in Tony Scott's True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino, as Floyd, Michael Rapaport's permanently stoned roommate. I love Pitt in this movie.
He doesn't have much screen time, but he gives us one of the greatest cinematic potheads ever created. Floyd is barely conscious, completely useless and absolutely hilarious, sitting around getting high and inadvertently pointing killers in the direction of the people they're trying to murder.
It's one of those performances where Pitt realized that being the funniest guy in the movie was more interesting than being the coolest guy in the movie. That instinct would serve him very well.
By the middle of the '90s, there was no stopping him. Interview with the Vampire. Legends of the Fall. Then David Fincher's Se7en, which is one of my favorite movies of all time and remains one of Pitt's strongest dramatic performances.
He followed that with Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, where he went in the complete opposite direction, playing Jeffrey Goines as this twitching, babbling, manic lunatic and earning his first Academy Award nomination for acting. That performance was another important moment because nobody could dismiss it as movie-star charisma. It was character acting. Big, strange, fearless character acting.
And then the career just keeps going. Sleepers. The Devil's Own. Seven Years in Tibet. Meet Joe Black, which I think is much better than its reputation and in which Pitt is very good.
Then in 1999 he reunited with Fincher for Fight Club and created Tyler Durden, one of the defining movie characters of the 1990s. It's a great performance because Pitt uses everything people thought they knew about him (his looks, his charisma, his coolness) and turns it into something dangerous and seductive and completely screwed up.
The next year he made Guy Ritchie's Snatch. I hate Snatch. I don't like the movie. I have never liked the movie. But Pitt is fantastic in it. As Mickey O'Neil, the incomprehensible bare-knuckle boxer, he's hilarious, bizarre and committed to a character that once again seems designed specifically to screw around with the Brad Pitt image.
You can't understand half of what he's saying, and that's the joke. He is easily my favorite thing in a movie I otherwise can't stand.
Then came the Ocean's movies with George Clooney and Matt Damon, where Pitt could relax into pure movie-star cool, followed by Troy, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Babel and a whole bunch of other movies, but in 2007 he gave what I think is one of his absolute greatest performances in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I adore this movie.
It is an epic, melancholy, gorgeous, deliberately paced piece of filmmaking, and Pitt's Jesse James is quiet, unpredictable, frightening and deeply sad. This is not Movie Star Brad Pitt. This is an actor using stillness, suspicion and tiny behavioral details to create a man who seems to know that his own legend has already swallowed him alive. If you've never seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, see it. It is one of the great American films of the 2000s.
And then, because this is Brad Pitt, he follows something that restrained by playing an absolutely magnificent moron in the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading. His Chad Feldheimer is one of my favorite Pitt creations, he is a cheerful, dim-witted gym employee who thinks he has stumbled into some gigantic espionage conspiracy and has absolutely no idea what the hell he is doing.
Watch Pitt's face in that movie. Watch the little dances. Watch the expressions. Watch how completely he commits to being an idiot. It's wonderful.
He made The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, another Fincher collaboration that isn't one of my favorites but was an enormous awards movie, and then he reunited with Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds, where his Lieutenant Aldo Raine and that absurd Tennessee accent are hilarious. “Bon-jor-no.” Come on.
He worked with Terrence Malick in the extraordinary The Tree of Life, gave one of his best understated performances as Billy Beane in Moneyball, reunited with Andrew Dominik for Killing Them Softly, did the zombie blockbuster World War Z, played a wonderfully hard-edged tank commander in Fury, turned up in The Big Short, and gave another performance I really like in Robert Zemeckis's criminally underrated World War II spy romance Allied.
And then came Cliff Booth.
Pitt's performance as Cliff in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is one of those wonderful combinations of actor and character where you can't imagine anybody else doing it. Leonardo DiCaprio is fantastic in that movie. Margot Robbie is fantastic in it.
But Pitt walks away with the thing. Cliff is funny, relaxed, mysterious, potentially dangerous, incredibly cool and somehow melancholy underneath all of it. Pitt finally won the acting Oscar he had deserved for years, taking Best Supporting Actor in 2020.
And we're getting Cliff again: Pitt returns in The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Tarantino and (here's the really interesting part) directed by David Fincher, bringing Pitt back together with the director of Se7en, Fight Club and Benjamin Button. The film is scheduled for an IMAX run beginning November 25 before arriving on Netflix December 23. I am, needless to say, very interested in that.
Pitt has continued to bounce around in ways that I find interesting. Ad Astra is strong. His brief appearance in The Lost City is basically Pitt having fun with the Brad Pitt image. Bullet Train is horrible (the less said about that one the better) but he's terrific in Babylon, even though I think Babylon itself is an enormous, exhausting, overstimulated mess.
He reunited with George Clooney for Wolfs, which didn't do much for me. And then there is F1, a gigantic hit that earned more than $630 million worldwide and even wound up nominated for Best Picture. I know people love that movie. I do not. I think it's basically Top Gun with race cars, only worse.
And that brings us back to Heart of the Beast, which is in theaters now. After something as gigantic and mechanical as F1, I loved seeing Pitt in a survival movie built around a man, a dog and their relationship.
It also feels strangely appropriate because when you look back over this entire career, Pitt has always been most interesting when he steps a little sideways from what you'd expect Brad Pitt to do.
His importance to movies also goes far beyond acting. Through Plan B Entertainment, Pitt has spent years helping get ambitious films made, including movies that don't necessarily scream safe, easy Hollywood product.
As a producer, he shared the Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, and Plan B has been involved with films including Moonlight, The Big Short, Women Talking and many others.
That's a significant part of his legacy. Brad Pitt the movie star has made a fortune starring in giant films, but Brad Pitt the producer has repeatedly used his position and influence to help filmmakers get challenging, unusual and important movies onto screens. I respect that enormously.
He's also been involved with philanthropic causes for decades, and his celebrity life has been so heavily documented that you could write an entire separate piece about Brad Pitt the Famous Person. I'm not particularly interested in doing that here. I'm interested in the movies.
Because after all the magazine covers, the romances, the haircuts, the awards, the enormous paychecks, the tabloid insanity and decades of being one of the most recognizable human beings walking around on Earth, I keep coming back to the same thing: Brad Pitt is a damn good actor.
He can be subtle. He can be hilarious. He can be scary. He can be heartbreaking. He can play the leading man or stroll into somebody else's movie for ten minutes and steal the thing. He's worked in comedy, drama, horror, science fiction, war movies, crime films, westerns, romances, action movies and gigantic blockbusters.
And, most importantly, he has never seemed particularly precious about being Brad Pitt. Some of his best performances come from making himself look stupid, behaving strangely, disappearing inside an accent or allowing that famous movie-star persona to be bent, mocked or completely dismantled.
That's what separates the movie star from the actor. Brad Pitt happens to be both.
So, with Heart of the Beast putting him back on movie screens (and with Cliff Booth waiting right around the corner) this seemed like the perfect time to go through this long, weird, enormously successful career and pick the performances that I love the most.
There were plenty that didn't make it, and some very good ones were painful to leave out. But I got it down to ten.
MY 10 FAVORITE BRAD PITT PERFORMANCES (in chronological order):
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