Beauty is only skin deep, and By the Sea doesn’t care to go further than that outermost layer.
By Josh Lasser
Hollywood has a fairly long history of individuals who have taken on the task of writing a movie, directing it, and then starring in that same film. There are times when it works (many Woody Allen movies), and there are times when it doesn’t (Yahoo Serious’ Young Einstein). Angelina Jolie Pitt’s new movie, By the Sea, is definitely one of those times when it doesn’t. Not remotely.
Appearing opposite the actress is her husband, Brad Pitt, in this tale of a rich, beautiful, couple with problems all their own. What problems? By the Sea isn’t terribly concerned with that for most of its runtime. It is just one of those bits that the movie feels is irrelevant – it’ll get around to telling the audience eventually, everyone knows that it will, but by the time it does get to it absolutely no one watching will care anymore.
What viewers are treated to for the majority of By the Sea is two self-pitying, self-loathing, self-medicating individuals – Roland (Brad Pitt) and Vanessa (Angelina Jolie Pitt). It is the 1970s (the film consciously tries to ape a style of European cinema from that era) and the two have opted to take a trip to a small seaside town in France so that Roland, a formerly great writer suffering from writer’s block, can write his next book.
Roland loves his wife, but she’s hurting and standoffish. He’s hurting, too. He drinks. She pops pills. They don’t talk, not really. They complain about each other’s bad habits, but they will not address what’s bothering them; not to each other and not to the audience.
We want to hear it.
For about an hour they don’t address anything of any import and then something amazing happens – even the film gets bored of the two characters. By the Sea shifts, and focuses much more heavily on the newlywed couple next door, Lea (Mélanie Laurent) and Francois (Melvil Poupaud).
There is a hole in the wall between the two couples’ rooms at the hotel and Roland and Vanessa become voyeurs, watching the newlyweds every evening. They actually go so far as to hurt the newlyweds for their own amusement and to hurt each other.
Why are they doing this? What has made them such horrible people? Again, the film is not interested in offering up this information. The audience is still just repeatedly reminded that they are rich and they are hurting.
Eventually, this very conscious, very extended attempt of By the Sea to not offer any insight whatsoever into the two characters at its center completely drives away any sort of sympathy on the part of the audience. If Roland and Vanessa don’t care to discuss their issues, if the film doesn’t care to explore them, why should the audience?
The smaller issue, but the one that becomes much more engrossing, is the existence of that hole. How is it possible that Lea and Francois haven’t noticed the hole in the wall? There is light in Vanessa and Roland’s room even when there isn’t light in Lea and Francois’, so surely that should have clued in the newlyweds (the light going from one room to the next is how Roland found the hole)? What about the noise that travels from one room to the next? Why hasn’t that clued in the newlyweds? When Vanessa first notices the hole, why does she not complain? There isn’t a couple staying in the room for her to watch voyeuristically at that moment, so there’s no reason to keep the hole. Vanessa is also someone who likes to make others miserable, so why wouldn’t she abuse the hotel staff about the hole?
All of this is to say that there is a problem with a movie when a hole in the wall becomes more interesting than the characters at that hole. This is a problem made worse when the unidirectional nature of the hole make it feel like an impossibility.
With a 122-minute runtime, the audience has ample time to contemplate this hole in the wall and all the issues that go along with it. Unfortunately, the audience will do just that rather than care about Vanessa and Roland.
The first words uttered by Vanessa in By the Sea, “I smell fish,” occur as she steps out of her car in the little seaside town where she and Roland will be staying. Rather than merely being a flat out rude, hideous thing to say as a newly arrived stranger in a community, it is better understood as a warning to the audience, a marker about the questionable nature of what is to come. By the Sea is a movie full of self-pity and self-loathing, and asks those watching it to care for characters which the movie itself doesn’t care for, or care to explore, in the slightest.
