Brad Pitt: 5 Awesome Performances and 5 That Sucked

2. Tree of Life- Mr. O'Brien

Another key trait of an archetypal €˜Pitt performance€™ is that his characters are quite easy to fathom. Though often entertaining, subtle, they ain€™t. You could probably write down Rusty Ryan€™s and Aldo Raine€™s motivations on the back of a fag packet. It€™s by virtue of his status as an A-lister that Pitt doesn€™t necessarily have to affiliate himself with the more out there, auteur cinema and the sometimes unnecessarily complex, pensive characters of that universe. Really then, it would€™ve been entirely possible that Brad Pitt and Terence Malick would never cross paths. Malick is a famous recluse who shuns the limelight; Pitt recently picked up the largest sum ever for celebrity pictures- $14 million from Hello! and People- for pictures of his new-born children. Different universes, is what I€™m saying. But cross paths they did, and Tree of Life was the result. Pitt really does swing for the fences here, but in a way we haven€™t seen before. As I said earlier, his characters are usually easy to pin down in their motivations. Yet Mr. O€™Brien is anything but. He€™s sympathetic and callous, understandable and irrational. Simply put, he€™s human, not a character. His motivation seems to be entirely based around his family, a noble effort that drags him through the mud. But unlike most films, it's not in a blatant manner. There's no obvious fall from grace here, no grand epiphanies. The drama is-whisper it-human. It's not overt, like in most films. Mr. O'Brien is a disciplinarian, not a psychopath. Though his methods seem draconian, he sees them as necessary, not in the style of the Nuremburg defence, but in a manner similar to 50s parents. Hell, even your parents committed some necessary evils raising you. He's not a film character, he's a person. And that's the point. Despite being Captain A-lister, Pitt has never seemed so...normal. Granted, wife-beating is not a normal state of affairs, but this was a portrayal of a man pushed to his limits, and this exacerbated his inherent (although not obvious) flaws. He was quick to fly off the handle- a very human flaw with which most of us could sympathise, even though we didn't condone the extent of his actions. Moral quandaries aside, the point is that these actions happen; 'normal' people are too tough on their kids, everyday people can be forced into terrible actions. Yet despite Pitt's obvious status at the zenith of the celebrity tree, he sold the hell out being a regular person, leading to a gripping performance. He's not a hero, he's not a villain. He's simply human, with all the light and shade that comes part and parcel of that. In the acting world, there's humanising your character, which often involves a shallow conceit (you want to make your action hero sympathetic? Get him a dog!), and then there's making your character human. This can't be done with cheap tricks- it's a very hard trick to pull off, and Pitt does it with aplomb.