Revisiting: Angelina Jolie's ethereal, enchanting meditation on the ruins of beauty.."BY THE SEA"
/“STYLE AS SUBSTANCE”
Call me a Stan, but By the Sea (or moreso the response to by the sea in my own opinion) is proof positive of implicit bias and the uphill battle women and minorities face in art while trying to demonstrate their own ability to create important works. From Oscar Micheaux to the Hughes Brothers and Kasi Lemmons, Shaft to Friday, and in this particular case Angelina Jolie - we have seen the struggle for them to have their work properly validated, and critiqued. By the Sea as directed by Jolie is a jarringly patient and accurate portrayal of the ways in which a relationship can become an exercise in cruelty and tedium. But critics lambasted it as merely a “Vanity project” to show off how good she and Brad could look in various couture. Since the beginning of this medium women and minorities have had to suffer the petulant dismissal of their work as inferior under the guise of coded language like pretentious, crude, some version of incomplete or in this case the " Vanity project". A term especially reserved for those folk who sought to rise above their station in our collective perception of them and create a body of work independent of the niche carved out for them by the industry or the audience. Like most slights these words tell us more about the mentalities of those writing them than they do their subjects. With Jolie’s luscious By the Sea, It seemed to upset a great deal of reviewers that these two gorgeous people (Most especially Jolie as director) dared to try and make something of substance. As far as I'm concerned it was perhaps even more upsetting that Jolie was successful in her endeavor. The consistent use of a term like vanity as a descriptor involving a woman with whom the public largely considers one of the most beautiful women in the world is just strikingly lazy. What ever would lead one to make such an assumption considering…I wonder ? There has long been a kind of bias implicit in society that pretty people should and can only be pretty. That trying to do anything else is merely a pursuit of vanity linked to feelings of invalidity outside the realm of the superficial. Now while on some level this may have SOME truth it ignores the flip side of that coin. That we the bourgeoisie, and peasant class of white patriarchal standards of beauty also seek validation through the insistence and persistence of this kind of labeling and sorting. Style without substance is a phrasology itself rooted in this kind of prejudice. Because when used so ubiquitously without interrogation it denies the fact that as one friend said to me in conversation “in many ways style itself can become a substance - or of substance”.
“bullitt” , “the warriors”, “drive”, and “mad max” are all examples of style as substance, and of course all directed by white males.
Jolie's film was routinely accused of that very overused and under interrogated sentiment, and then dismissed as vain and self serving because “look at her”. I would ask how much of this is our fault? I think its fair that as critics we admit our own biases, our own prejudices. Admit that even though we have studied film, and criticism for varying amounts of years, and generally act in good faith - that we too can be obstructed from taking in a movie the way we should. Would this common critique be the same with anyone else in the role in this same ostentatious attire? Would we be talking about eye shadow and not the eyes themselves (which I believe Jolie puts to great use throughout much of the film)
Jolie is almost always distracting in some way which is all the more reason for us to get over our preoccupation with her “otherworldly beauty” and focus on her actual performance, as well as her direction. Yes “By the Sea” is a gorgeous, sumptuous, mesmerizing, and at times meandering film, but so was Godot’s Breathless. But go beyond all that physical beauty and you will find a film doing quite a lot more than being statuesque and beautiful. You will find something that peers through the veil of otherness from within a couple’s tragedy. A deliberate and pensive visual study into style over substance. The hypnotic allure of the aesthetic. The austere view from a distance, ostentation as banal, beauty as devastating, and familiarity tediously played out as the exact tragedy between two lovers . The gross luxury, the scenic fantasy, the long excruciating beats all aided in telling a stirringly bleak story about the ways in which wounds are inflicted, get infected, and then fester in the dead space between desire and possession. The lack of communication is not meant to be merely an stylistic choice, it's a narrative decision meant to illuminate the amount of damage done. By design, the artifice of beauty takes the edge off the “in your faceness” of the hurt. The depression, the anger, the discomfort. And if this was some pigeon faceded white male, drenched in self depreciation, and faux "aw shucks- ness" we might be discussing the intentional space between objects, words, and between the couples. Or the purity of the melodrama and it's effective utilization as a narrative device. Or acknowledge that the set design wasn't just some left over shoot from a forgotten cover story in Architectural Digest, but an intentional focus meant to make us aware of the sterility, and of what isn't there in the relationship. Instead critics were content lobbing our own insecurity out over the plate and letting our egos drive a shot over the fence for a home run of the same kind of vanity Jolie is accused of.
Jolie’s film consistently explores the distance between things.
