[yasr_overall_rating]
Set in France during the mid-1970s, Vanessa, a former dancer, and her husband Roland, an American writer, travel the country together. They seem to be growing apart, but when they linger in one quiet, seaside town they begin to draw close to some of its more vibrant inhabitants, such as a local bar/café-keeper and a hotel owner.
I dig misery movies, women and men going mad and doing mad things to each other as well as others, letting the tension build to suffocating levels, only to relent in dozy drunken morning afters. Quiet misery, however, is harder to attain successfully, as subtlety is difficult to render soft mannerisms, marked silence, and glazed teary eyes as powerful. Angelina Jolie Pitt’s “By the Sea,” attempts such a thing but falls short in this vision of human breakdown and voyeuristic obsession.
Angelina and Brad Pitt star in this marital drama as Vanessa, a former dancer consumed by her misery, and Roland a writer who has a fondness for drink and a touch of writer’s block. They drive through the country and arrive at a fairly secluded hotel by the sea. It is elegant yet contains enough of the rough and charming simplicity that those looking to get away, or run away, desire. The film is marked by its silence, with the first words spoken by Vanessa being, “I smell fish,” in a hushed but blunt tone, as they first arrive at the hotel. It sets the tone for the many more hushed resentful child-like statements to pass Vanessa’s lips.
It is obvious something is wrong between Vanessa and Roland, and one can hazard a guess that it doesn’t simply chalk up to Roland’s boozing or lack of writing, but rather an event or events of the past festering, cloaking Vanessa in thickening darkness, despite Roland’s vain attempts of goading Vanessa to come out of her pill induced state of being. It isn’t until a hole in the wall is discovered along with a young newly married couple, whose hypersexual relationship is both intriguing to and internally vilified by Vanessa that things get interesting.
You know a film is tedious when a two hour film feels like four hours, and even after it’s over you’re still not sure if anything really happened, or if you even care anymore. “By the Sea,” is such a film. While it succeeds atmospherically with the hazy seaside surroundings, simple but chic fashions, and the sounds of yé-yé French pop music, creating the perfect Vogue editorial material, the film is a bit banal. Jolie is visually haunting as she languidly glides from here to there in flowy nightgowns in a face of smeared eyeliner and tears. Her physical presence is strong but weakened when she opens her mouth. The film died for me when a self-drenched Jolie walks into the room and proclaims to her husband in the saddest of broken babydoll voices, “Now my outsides match my insides.” In a moment where one should feel heartbreak for what Jolie’s character Vanessa is feeling, you feel over it, and just done. Even the moments when Jolie is completely mesmerizing and interesting can’t make up for that dreck of a scene.
Pitt is no better as the floundering clichéd drunken writer. This whole scenario of husband and wife tension has been done before, and done better, albeit not as glamorously, in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf,” starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps the two shouldn’t be compared, but nevertheless I had wished I were watching the exceedingly uncomfortable exchanges between Burton and Taylor, than that of Pitt and Jolie.
In select theaters now
