I worry about Brad Pitt. To those who say you should have his problems I say fair enough. But Brad needs magic I tell you. He needs the kind of magic that turns a beefcake heartthrob into a fascinating character actor, thus revealing hitherto hidden acting depths that are normally assumed to only exist in the unbeautiful.
It is the kind of magic that transformed Hugh Grant from a hapless floppy-haired Englishman into the most compelling presence in any film he appears in. On a bigger scale it is this very week happening before our eyes with Tom Cruise whose reinvention for the environmental emergency satire Digger will surely open up roles more complex than his Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible franchise.
Cruise, however, has always shown a capacity for complexity. Pitt, not so much, and even less so in his most recent movies. In his previous offering F1 he co-starred with growling cars as a Formula One driver who had little emotional attachment to anything or anyone other than speed. For his latest, directed by David Ayer – who last worked with Pitt in the WWII battle tank thriller Fury – the star plays James Belmont, a former special operations soldier who carries the physical and mental scars of his tours of duty in Afghanistan. So does his best friend and constant companion Odin, a “combat canine” who fought with Belmont on the front line, leaving the dog with three legs and one prosthetic limb.
To escape their trauma they strike out into the isolated landscape of Alaska. In their tent the pair have the same dreams of being under fire in battle. Similar to Jacob Elordi in Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, Pitt’s equally meditative Belmont and his dog also find solace from the pain of the past by flying over stunning landscape in a rickety single-prop plane.
Mauro Fiore’s gorgeous cinematography makes you want to go to Alaska. But it shouldn’t because the movie was filmed in New Zealand. I have a beef with this. If a film is set in a named place and photographs the landscape so breathtakingly it becomes a character in the film, it feels like a lie to find everything you thought you had learnt about that part of the world is false.
Of course, half the movie industry would not exist if film locations had to be where the story is set. But in some films the landscape is the story. Heart of the Beast is one such. The glassy lakes and plunging valleys; the peaks and glaciers are as humbling as they are awe-inspiring.
The plot establishes itself when Belmont has a heart attack and crashes his sea plane into the wilderness. What follows is a series of near-death experiences as they encounter a colossal bear, a pack of wolves and white-water rapids all of which do their best to kill our heroes.
Odin the dog (real name Uber) is an absolute star. But Pitt as the all-American hero with that smouldering thousand-yard stare of his stays well within his comfort zone. Again.
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