ove
her or hate her, it's not hard to feel just a little bit in awe of
Angelina Jolie.Impossibly beautiful, smart and talented (she's got an Oscar to prove it) she is almost more famous for her social activism than her movies.
Even her relationship with Brad Pitt took an occasional backseat to news of her latest humanitarian effort -- until earlier this year.
In January, Jolie was in the Dominican Republic filming The Good Shepherd, the big-budget, Oscar-touted film about the history of the CIA. At the same time, the actress was preparing to travel to nearby Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere, in her capacity as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.
Then word came via an aid worker that Jolie had confided the two magic words "I'm pregnant." And her trip with paramour Pitt suddenly took on the magnitude of a head-of-state visit, with hordes of press from around the world.
It was just another flashpoint in the strange life of Angelina Jolie, but it was a significant one that magnified three major aspects of her life as it has played out in front of the world.
First, it brought even more attention to her activist status, highlighted during special TV appearances with CNN's Anderson Cooper as part of World Refugee Day, as well as an interview with Dateline's Anne Curry who visited Jolie in Namibia prior to the birth of Shiloh in May. Even the coveted first baby photos of Shiloh were sold to People magazine for a reported $4 million -- with all the money donated to African charities.
And since 2001, when she was named Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Jolie has been ferociously dedicated to her job, visiting Sudan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Kenya, Cambodia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Thailand, Egypt, Ecuador, Tanzania and Jordan.
Secondly, it made her celebrity status even more complex -- making her pregnancy THE story in the entertainment media, arguably relegating TomKat into second place through sheer volume of coverage. This coming from a woman whose past was well documented -- from her marriages to Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, to her estranged relationship with her father Jon Voight (one that carries on regardless in the press). Then came her quoted vows that she would never become pregnant and her interview with Marie Claire magazine in which she said she "could not, could not look myself in the morning" if she ever became involved with a married man given her father's own adultery.
And finally -- lest we forget -- it appears to have had an effect on her career, especially in terms of choices.
You'd hardly think she had time for one between her roles as scandal figure, UN celebrity icon and mother (to Maddox, 5, Zahara, 2, and Shiloh, six months). But Jolie has quietly become -- well, perhaps "quietly" isn't the best description -- the biggest box office draw among Hollywood actresses these days, with a price tag of $15 million-plus per movie. (This on the heels of the box-office hit Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the movie in which she met the already-married future father of her child, and bucked the theory that scandals equal bad box office.)
The Good Shepherd, with its $100 million-plus budget and A-list
cast (it's directed by Robert De Niro and stars Academy Award-winner Matt
Damon), is a leading "prestige" candidate for this year's
Oscars. For a long time, Eric Roth's screenplay about the history of the
CIA was considered among the best (and most problematic) unproduced
screenplays in Hollywood.Damon plays idealistic young Edward Wilson, an America-loving alumnus of Yale and the fabled Skull & Bones fraternity, a "best and brightest" elitist organization that has inspired countless conspiracy theories. (Skull & Bones grads include two presidents named Bush.) Skull & Bones was also the breeding ground for the World War II-era OSS (Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA) and the nascent post-war Central Intelligence Agency during the no-holds-barred Cold War.
It's in this context where The Good Shepherd picks up Wilson's story, as well as that of his wife Clover (Jolie), a highly-intelligent housewife who discovers early on that her husband's dream job involves a myriad of covert activities including murder. Eventually, Clover rationalizes these realities as she resolves to stay with Edward. "There's a lot of danger and discomfort in what it is she doesn't know," Jolie says of her deliberately-oblivious character. "It's not just that her husband had a phone call and she doesn't know who the phone call was from. It's that the phone call could be somebody being killed, or being ordered to be killed."
A stressful context, and a stressful situation for the then-pregnant Jolie (she reportedly became prone to fainting on set as the movie and the baby raced towards the finish line). But the birth of her first baby didn't exactly signal a lengthy maternity leave for Jolie. Within weeks she had signed on to voice Tigress, a character in the kids' movie Kung Fu Panda, starring Jack Black.
And then came a more resonant announcement. Jolie announced she'd be playing Mariane Pearl -- the French-born wife of American journalist Daniel Pearl who was beheaded by Islamic radicals in Pakistan in 2002 -- in an adaptation of Pearl's book A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life And Death Of My Husband Danny Pearl. A laudable enough project, but one that tweaked prurient interests with the announcement that it would be produced by Plan B, the production company founded by Pitt and ex-wife (and spurned woman) Jennifer Aniston. Dan Futterman, a sitcom actor now best known as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Capote, plays Daniel Pearl.
Filmed on location in late 2006 in Pakistan and various locations in
India, A Mighty Heart gave Jolie yet another opportunity to team
her film work with Third World appearances on behalf of the United
Nations.Oscar buzz for The Good Shepherd and other films doesn't faze Jolie, who won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Girl, Interrupted. "These days, I don't know what the Oscars mean," Jolie told the Associated Press. "I started to travel and realized there was so much I was unaware of... and daily global events I was not hearing about in the news, so I wanted to understand."
I never had a sense of purpose, never felt useful as a person. I think a lot of people have that feeling -- wanting to kill yourself or take drugs or numb yourself out because you can't shut it off or you just feel bad and you don't know what it's from," said Jolie.
"You could die tomorrow and you've done a few movies, won some awards -- that doesn't mean anything," she continues. "But if you've built schools or raised a child or done something to make things better for other people, then it just feels better. Life is better."
-- Jim Slotek
