The Mommy Track
ANGELINA JOLIE does not travel light.
A few weeks ago, when she arrived for the New York Film Festival premiere of âChangeling,â the new Clint Eastwood drama in which she stars, she brought along her partner of three years, Brad Pitt, and their sons, Maddox, 7, and Pax, 4, daughters Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2, and 3-month-old twins Knox and Vivienne. The eight of them had flown in from Germany, where the family has settled while Mr. Pitt shoots Quentin Tarantinoâs World War II adventure âInglorious Bastards.â
âWeâre all a little jet-lagged,â she said, not looking jet-lagged in the least as she settled in for a brief stay at the Waldorf-Astoria before moving the clan on to New Orleans. Carrying a lot of baggage is something Ms. Jolie seems to greet with serenity â as a mother. As an actress, however, she knows it poses a potential problem.
At 33 she occupies a rare place within Hollywoodâs uppermost tier of female stars. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she cannot escape her several identities. The serious actress who won an Oscar for 1999âs âGirl, Interruptedâ and much acclaim for playing Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, in last yearâs âMighty Heartâ is also the dominatrix-ish action dynamo who can open slam-bang guy movies, like this summerâs âWanted.â Thereâs also the humanitarian activist who has served as a United Nations good-will ambassador and is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And thereâs her role as half of Brangelina, an unincorporated business that remains the celebrity magazine industryâs best bet for surviving the economic crisis.
Ms. Jolie, who is disarmingly easygoing and more delicately beautiful and finely featured than red-carpet photographs suggest, said she mostly manages to ignore her alternate plane of existence as a tabloid sensation. She lives âin a bit of a bubble when it comes to peopleâs perceptions of me, which Iâm sure is a very good thing,â she said, laughing, âbecause Iâm sure itâs not always very nice.â
If Ms. Jolie finds the attention irritating, sheâs too smart to complain about it. But she admits that the wealth of available information about her could create a self-defeating conundrum. Her ever-growing fame could endanger her ability to do the very job that made her famous in the first place â to make audiences believe sheâs somebody else. In short, to vanish.
âCan I do that?â she asked. âI certainly hope so. I wouldnât put myself forward to do a film like âChangelingâ if I thought I couldnât pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.â
In âChangelingâ Ms. Jolie plays Christine Collins, a switchboard supervisor and single mother in 1928 Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son is kidnapped. (The story has its roots in a series of gruesome killings known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.) Five months after the childâs disappearance, the Los Angeles Police Department hands her a boy it insists is her son, and department officials attempt to destroy her life when she says theyâre wrong. The role, in which Ms. Jolie must embody the agony of not knowing if her only child has been murdered, puts her, in some ways, back in the wrenching territory of her last drama, âA Mighty Heart.â
When Ms. Jolie first read the âChangelingâ script, âI said, this is absolutely great, and I never want to do it,â she recalled. âI donât want to put my consciousness on children being kidnapped. But I couldnât forget about her. I found myself telling Brad and friends of mine the story.â
âChangelingâ arrived at an especially painful moment for Ms. Jolie. In January 2007 her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer at 56. âMy mom, she was a very, very soft woman,â she said. âIt was hard for her to yell, or even curse. But when it came to fighting for her kids, she found a strength she didnât always know she had. And thereâs a part of Christine that I connected to her. I kept pictures of my mom in the little pursesâ that her character carries in the movie.
Grief hit Ms. Jolie hard â and led, oddly, not to âChangelingâ but to âWanted,â a blood-splashed, R-rated comic-book adaptation in which she gives what she wryly called âmy Clint Eastwood performanceâ as a ruthless, almost superhuman gunslinger who utters barely two dozen lines.
âI knew instinctively that I needed something before âChangeling,â â she said. âI was depleted. I was in a state of just wanting to pull the covers over my head and cry about my mom. It was just too much. For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a âTomb Raider,â has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. Itâs like therapy.â
Ms. Jolie, who says she doesnât particularly like to watch her own work, hasnât seen âWanted.â The film has grossed more than $300 million worldwide. âIâm glad it worked out,â she said with a smile.
She has, however, seen âChangeling.â âClint asked me to,â she said. âWhat are you going to do, say no to Clint?â Except for a brief hello years ago backstage at CNNâs âLarry King Live,â Ms. Jolie said she had never met Mr. Eastwood until she arrived on the âChangelingâ set. But she knew of his reputation for running a tight ship and for finishing even complicated scenes in just a couple of takes.
âI can sometimes roll without even saying a word,â Mr. Eastwood said of his filming process. âIâll just motion to the cameraman, and he turns it on, and there we go. But she understood what things are like, and she was ready.â
Ms. Jolie described it in other terms. âIt made me terribly nervous,â she said. âThe first day it moved so quickly. There are big, emotional, heavy things in that movie where it was, maximum, two takes. So I woke up in the morning not feeling relaxed. I would make sure I understood where my character was coming from, I was prepared emotionally, my lines were crisp. I was more ready than Iâd ever been on a film because thatâs what he demands.â By the end, Ms Jolie â who learned she was pregnant just before she was to shoot her harrowing scenes set in a mental institution â said she felt âthis is how I should always work: I should always be this professional and prepared.â
Since winning her Oscar almost 10 years ago Ms. Jolie has carved out a distinctive identity; unlike most other actresses of her age she is interchangeable with no one. Growing up, she said, she found her on-screen role models werenât actresses but rather âAl Pacino in âDog Day Afternoon,â Brando in âStreetcar,â Nicholson â I just always liked the men.â That may be part of the reason she has become virtually the only current A-list actress to achieve her status while completely bypassing romantic comedies. Nobody is ever likely to call her âAmericaâs Sweetheart.â
A dark period, when Ms. Jolie was cast as the man eater who broke up Mr. Pittâs marriage to Jennifer Aniston during the production of the 2005 caper âMr. and Mrs. Smith,â is behind her. And although in her 20s she was prone to provocative statements about blood, tattoos and bisexuality, in her early 30s she has learned how to feed the beast while making it serve her purposes. Recently she and Mr. Pitt auctioned off pictures of themselves with their newborn twins to People and Hello! magazines, raising an astonishing $14 million for their charity, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.
Today her career strategy seems more akin to, say, George Clooneyâs than to Cameron Diazâs. She has amassed an impressive record in action-driven hits like the âTomb Raiderâ movies and âGone in 60 Secondsâ while making regular (and generally less successful) forays into more serious work, most recently in ensemble pieces like the 2006 drama âThe Good Shepherdâ or lower-budgeted movies like âA Mighty Heart,â in which several critics suggested that her fine performance was undermined by the fact of her celebrity.
âChangeling,â a big-studio drama that she must carry on her shoulders while submerging the tensile, sexually charged physicality with which she has often defined herself, is another step outside of her comfort zone. And while Ms. Jolie discussed the film with enthusiasm, it was evident that her mind isnât mainly on movies now. She has taken all of 2008 off from filmmaking and has only one movie lined up â the spy thriller âEdwin A. Salt,â which will begin production in February and which, in an indication of her box office clout in action films, was reconceived for her after Tom Cruise dropped out.
In addition she will reprise her vocal performance as Tigress in the sequel to this summerâs âKung Fu Pandaâ â the only one of her roughly three dozen movies that any of her children have seen. âItâs a big hit in the house,â she said. âJack Black is like De Niro to the kids.â
After that, she said, sheâll stay home for another full year, and she expects acting to play a diminishing role in her life as time goes by. For the past several months, since the twins were born, the older kids have been home-schooled, âand theyâve had Mommy and Daddy every day for every meal, and theyâve been very close to us.â Itâs not a routine sheâs eager to disrupt. Deciding to take a job is âreally hard,â she said. âWhoâs in school at that time? How can I be sure I donât do too many long hours? Can the three youngest be on the set every day?â
âAs long as I can still be with my family, itâs fun,â she added. âBut I only want to do that, and Iâm not looking for anything else.â
About that family, she and Mr. Pitt arenât planning to stop at six. âOh, no,â she said happily. âI mean, I know we seem crazy, just bringing them in one after the other, but we do plan. We make sure one is absorbed completely into the family before we add another. There are moments when we look at everyone around the dinner table, and itâs just crazy, but our family is the greatest thing weâve done in our lives.â
Itâs hardly surprising that the children are Ms. Jolieâs focus right now. (âJust come tell me if you need me to pump,â she said to an assistant before starting the interview.) She worries about the day that Maddox, who is now old enough to use the Internet, will âlook up my name and see some kind of sexy pictures or read a story about himself that isnât true. Thereâs a lot weâre going to have to explain to them about how public their family is.â
Nonetheless, she said, she looks forward to the day when she can put âMr. and Mrs. Smithâ in the DVD player for the children; ânot a lot of people get to see a movie where their parents fell in love.â
âWhatâs going to be funny is when they think Mom and Dad are a little bit cool,â she added. âBecause right now, weâre not cool Mom and Dad.â
âEven video games, you know, itâs: âMom, you canât play this. You wonât know how.â Oh, they all think I canât do anything, that Iâm just there to snuggle with. But the other day Madd said, âCan you do a cartwheel?â And I said, âYeah, I can.â And he was like, âWow, Mom.â And I thought: âOh, yeah. I can do some things. You wait. Youâll find out. Iâm capable.â â
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/movies/1...amp;oref=slogin
