major achievements by age 60

On December 18, Brad Pitt turns 60. Specially for Weekend in a short congratulatory speech Zinaida Pronchenko recalls the outstanding career of an actor, producer, sex symbol, role model and just a person who changed his life by coming up with “Plan B” in time.

According to the official legend, Brad Pitt first saw the Hollywood hills from the window of the Datsun in which he fled from his native Oklahoma, leaving behind two unfinished highs, little more than broken hearts and a thunderstorm front hanging over the Ozark plateau. Accepting numerous awards in 2020 (including an Oscar) for his role as Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt hinted with a bitter smile: today this legend belongs to autumn. Indeed, the saga of a sensitive cowboy and his imperturbable understudy, who asks the original not to shed tears in front of the Mexicans, became a kind of summing up of a whole life. And not only for Pitt, but also for Quentin Tarantino, and even for Leonardo DiCaprio. However, a postscript was needed. A couple of years later, Damien Chazelle’s “Babel” was released, where Pitt plays a hero who is so emotional that only a bullet to the temple can calm him down, calm him down forever. If Tarantino was saying goodbye to the sixties – the last American spring of the twentieth century, then Chazelle was burying the roaring 1920s, the gold standard from which it all began. It’s amazing, Pitt reasoned in a promotional interview, how the storm and stress of the decade remained expressively silent from the screen, and then we launched into chatter – alas, which did not drown out the eloquent crimes committed behind the scenes.

In Brad Pitt’s filmography, by the way, there was already one “Babylon” – in 2006, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, in his characteristic tear-jerking and tear-jerking manner, likened the whole world to a den of thieves and harlots. In 2022, Babylon was narrowed down to Hollywood, outside of which, as we know, there is no life, at least no real life.

Pitt belongs to a generation that experienced life exclusively in the darkness of the cinema. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone, “taught him to wear a raincoat in sunny weather, to smoke in the wind and in the rain.” Today, he, along with Tarantino, who, along with David Fincher, calls Pitt the last Hollywood star, laments that young people have not seen either “The Godfather” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Since the “returned names” column has been selflessly run by Martin Scorsese for many years, Pitt decided to tackle those who are not given the floor—auteur directors (a term from long-forgotten texts by Pauline Kael and François Truffaut) who dream of leaving the ghetto of conventional mumblecore and telling a story , costing a little more than $10 million. Between blockbusters, starting from 70 million, and the quietest indies, limited to seven, there is a fork with which Pitt, as a producer, regularly hooks viewers so that they do not feel at ease – after all, crimes are being committed behind the scenes again , one is more eloquent than the other. “The Departed,” “Eat Pray Love,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Selma,” “Minari,” “Okja,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” is a way to cope with the fears that plague everyone, and with a midlife crisis that plagues even him.

Pitt came up with the idea of ​​becoming a producer in the early 2000s, after the Twin Towers, along with which the American myth of democracy and capitalism as optimal world order systems collapsed. In 2004, he was preparing to say goodbye to the role of superstar and superhero in Troy. Pitt played the rage of Peleus’ son, already having the baggage of a highly experienced husband behind him, which is why the festive Achaean chiton is clearly too tight for him, and his own lush curls of the famous wheat shade are annoying. Not everything that glitters on the poster in large font is gold. In the monumental revelations of a very tired man, published by GQ, Pitt explains: you can’t look for interesting roles all the time, one day your life will stop being interesting.

It is on “Troy” that he will create a production company with the self-explanatory name “Plan B”. In 10 years, this project will go from being a backup plan to the main one. Pitt will only agree to lead or simply significant roles out of respect for eternity or, alas, for Angelina Jolie. In other cases, his name in the credits must be monitored with special attention, otherwise you risk missing it.

“The Tree of Life,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Tarantino’s two attempts to rewrite history, and finally, James Gray’s “Ad Astra” are all respectful nods to the veterans of cinema who do their best to maintain its reputation as the most important of the arts. It cannot be said that the tandem of the last real Hollywood star, who monopolizes the screen even in a cameo for the Coen brothers, and the great masters each time led to the creation of absolute masterpieces. In Malick, Pitt obediently goes to the slaughter, organized by a believing rebel, whose reason for the rebellion has disappeared without a trace in cosmic dust. Malik is generally a pure curse for actors. Even sacred animals like Christian Bale or Sean Penn turn into Pinocchio before our eyes; their eyes literally glaze over from the abundance of monotonous esotericism that needs to be uttered on camera. The toxic masculinity that Pitt portrays in “The Tree of Life” will come back to haunt him in 2019 from the lips of Tommy Lee Jones, who was of no use, too busy with the movement of the celestial spheres of his father. And behind the dull vacuum of a designer spacesuit, that same cosmic dust, also known as dramaturgical scum, quietly settles. Was it worth traveling to Mars to make sure that life there is an empty and stupid joke? The existential problems of men over fifty do not necessarily require cosmogony as a setting. Looking at infinity, Pitt repeats after Van Gogh the dying mantra: only sadness has no end.

With Fincher, who appointed him as a symbol of “irreversibility,” they seem to be rehearsing the first long send-off; very soon the directors will begin to build a memorial complex around the figure of Pitt for the irrevocably gone days. It must be strange and scary to watch the film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray like a countdown. On the screen, youth returns to you, but in the screening room, time dictates its own. There is nothing more poignant than memories, Pitt tells reporters through gritted teeth, even death is not as terrible as dreams of what it took. What can we say about Cliff Booth or Lieutenant Aldo Raine, all they have to do is take death into their care, rearrange its route a little – so that the cost of the trip for humanity is reduced.

In 2019, Pitt, like all cinephiles, will read Brian Raftery’s program book “The Best Year in Cinema History.” We’re talking about 1999. Of the list of films that, according to Raftery, “blew up the screen,” Pitt himself participated in two: “Fight Club” and “Being John Malkovich.” Twenty years later, Pitt no longer remembers the first rule of the fight club – do not tell anyone about the battles with yourself – because he has outgrown the patriarchal code of honor, which, naturally, turned out to be a hospital card – a chronicle of ordinary madness. But Pitt is happy to admit that Tyler Durden is the pinnacle of his acting career, although he has played different types of madness before. In Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, he was overly concerned about the environment; in California, at the dawn of his life, he crossed the line for the sake of love, which, as often happens, turned into an abusive disorder. If we consider the loss of reason equal to non-existence – I think, therefore I exist – then in this field Pitt is the king. “Very nice, death,” blue-eyed Joe Black introduces himself, looking like he stepped out of a Perry Ellis ad from the philosophical rom-com of the same name. Forgive me for my long-standing respect for life, Louis de Pont du Lac, a vampire disdainful of his destiny, apologizes in Interview with the Vampire. Durden, however, is the first among equals – with his muscular figure in a foppish leather jacket, he obscures the era of innocence from posterity: the nineties are over, abandon hope, everyone entering the new century, there will be no mercy here.

And yet, appearances are not deceptive; better than anyone else (after Robert Redford and Paul Newman, of course), Pitt embodies indomitable luck or just a happy accident in the cinema. He early achieved perfection in the typically American way: calm with insolence, the charm of aplomb, the ignorance in which lies the true strength of real winners. Well, the truth is, Pitt knows how to play better than his competitors – he always has his own, bordering on profit, with young blood and soil, rich in lime in the Ozarks. Hence his signature technique – first squint, then look somewhere to the side – the endless expanses of Missouri and Oklahoma. This is how he is in “Ocean’s Friends”, and in “Legends of the Fall”, and in “The Devil’s Own”, and in “Thelma and Louise” that made him famous, and in the late “The Man Who Changed Everything”. The only exceptions, perhaps, are two paintings. “Seven”, where he lost and screams like a wounded animal who wants to be finished off: “What’s in the box? What’s in this box? And “True Love,” where he is too lazy to even try to get up from the couch, also, however, shouting: “Get some beer and some cleaning products.” This ability, described by one of the baseball scouts in “The Man Who Changed Everything” with an obscene phrase – he walks into a room as if his penis had been there for twenty minutes – became obvious almost on our first, absolutely fleeting date, in Levi’s commercial from 1991, in which he snatches a camera from prison guards to capture his will to live and his joy in it.

Nobody remembers, but a year before this breakthrough contract, he would star, thanks to the patronage of Juliette Lewis, in a passable film, the title of which sounds like a question – “Too Young To Die?”, Too Young to Die? In 2023, judging by the sad reasoning in the interview, Pitt is ready to give a negative answer. No, not too much, just right. Luckily, he has a plan B.

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