Eileen Battersbyon BRAD PITTand HOMER
FLY FISHING in Montana and The Iliaddon't appear to have much in common yet oddly they do through Hollywood movie star Brad Pitt. As a fledging actor who had shot to fame via a soap named Dallasand as the teenage prostitute in Thelma and Louise (1991) he was then cast (no pun intended) as the troubled and doomed Paul in the screen adaptation of retired University of Chicago English professor Norman Maclean's autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It(1992). The movie which remains faithful to the story of two very different brothers, sons of a Presbyterian minister in Western Montana, was directed by Robert Redford. It shimmered with long shots of water and dry-fly angling executed with grace and serenity. Pitt dressed in the tweeds and baggy cloth caps of the 1920's did bear an at times eerie resemblance to a young Redford. Well, so many movies and Angelina Jolie on, Pitt then appeared as a sulky, reluctant superhero Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy(2004) – based on Homer's epic. It has often proved too easy to concentrate on Pitt's private life, he who forsook the wholesomely naff Friendsactress, Jennifer Aniston, for Jolie a terrifyingly sultry siren who in an earlier life may well have been a Helen.
So how good is he? Well, even his detractors would have to admit that in Andrew Dominik's elegiac, masterfully choreographed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford(2007) Pitt was superb and thrived in the prevailing mood of archaic elegance as a preoccupied James pondering mortality and the obsessive attention of Ford, his disciple and eventual killer. It was a great movie, and Pitt gave an intelligent, woefully underrated performance. There have also been turkeys while he has been known to give good-naturedly comic turns as in the Coen Brothers' not-so-hot Burn After Reading(2008). Yet now in an unexpectedly astute flourish the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has included Pitt among the best actor nominations for Moneyballin which he plays Billy Beane, a real life character who having failed to fulfil his potential as a player became a manager of a low-budget Los Angeles baseball team with a sorry record of losing players it has groomed to richer clubs. It is excellent, evokes the behind-the-scenes intrigue of professional sport and does justice to the mighty ballet known as baseball. A convincing Pitt, at his very best, has already won three awards for it, with four pending as well as a further 11 nominations.
If the Gods, Homeric and otherwise, deign to support the father of six, Pitt could — and should — beat an admittedly impressive George Clooney to home base. No one, not even a career humanitarian, could feel sorry for the likeable Clooney should he lose while Pitt, whose baby-faced features have become coarsened with time, remains oddly sympathetic and would be a popular winner.
