This was more pronounced in the 1990s, when he ricocheted from great works like Kalifornia, as the lurching menace Early Grayce (which Roger Ebert called one of the most “harrowing and convincing performances” he’d ever seen) to straight-up middling work, sporting a wavering accent in The Devil’s Own. What has held him back has been his lack of consistency. He actually doesn’t get enough credit for the way he uses his body as an extension of his face.” His work in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is being recognized for this very reason: His physicality speaks fully to a character’s history and portrays a remarkable self-possession.
As Elaine Lui wrote on Lainey Gossip, “As it is with all true Movie Stars, Brad Pitt’s face is a full body experience. Pitt instead has a tremendous understanding and use of his body. He’s also not the kind of actor who tries to prove his mettle by making the labor of acting visible through tortuous realism (Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-nabbing turn in The Revenant) or by obscuring his beauty (Christian Bale, in everything since American Psycho Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler).
In films like 2016’s Allied, he seems bored with playing the stock dashing American hero. Despite his looks and presence, he makes a poor matinee idol. Pitt is thus one of the few neo-stars whose persona is located in, rather than denied by, his edgier projects.” Indeed, Pitt dazzled in his collaborations with David Fincher as the hotshot young detective in Seven and the enigma Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Seven and Fight Club, by contrast, were huge hits. As Basinger writes, “Many of ‘safer’ choices have actually been among the worst failures of Pitt’s career. One of the most perceptive insights into his work comes at the end of Jeanine Basinger’s trenchant book, The Star Machine. Pitt’s decisions as an actor betray a curiosity I’ve always found admirable. But is he a great actor? This question is trickier to answer because of the scope of his career and how subtle his best work can be. He’s the kind of movie star that has become increasingly rare - larger than life, assured, contradictory, physically mesmerizing, with a strong understanding of the power of persona.
He has an enviable coolness that snakes through his work onscreen, most recently used to great effect in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Courtesy of Studiosīrad Pitt is undeniably a great movie star.