America’s biggest movie star, Brad Pitt has never really starred in a movie. But he does reprise one role over and over: the superior being.
A Brad Pitt movie is never about his character, but rather about other characters reacting to his stasis, his perfection and his flat-out otherworldliness. His movies depict regular people dealing with his irregular perfection. We watch and listen as they must evolve in order to comprehend him. They abide in his shadow. And they tell us about him. He has come among us. He is the new version, the knower, the seer. He need not develop for he has long sense arrived at stillness, at godhood.
Pitt always plays one of four iterations of the same archetype:
Via: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
The Man God: Roles without quirk, where Pitt is calmly serious, coolly radiant and often death incarnate. I'm talking about Achilles, Joe Black, the sexier brother in Legends of the Fall, the better brother in A River Runs Through It… In these he is the true man from other. He tastes our vodka, caviar, our peanut butter and he deems it good. His perfections drive his co-characters mad, vengeful or old. They cannot predict him, depend on him or leave him. They writhe in efforts to summit, but he, the mountain, shakes them down with a smirk.
See also: Killing Them Softly, Inglorious Basterds, Megamind
