Angelina Jolie very publicly got a preventive double mastectomy to deter her 87% chance of breast cancer, all the while promoting annual testing and check ups for women so that they too could lower their chances of getting the disease. She has been visiting refugee camps and working as a committed ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for the past 14 years. In fact, every time she visits the camps, she pays out of her own pocket and lives in the same condition as other field staff members. She works closely as an advocate for bettering the lives of child immigrants, even creating schools around the middle east in places such as Afghanistan and Kenya, where one young female student, named Naomi Chol, actually happened to possess the highest rank in her academic region. (The story of Chol is an incredible one detailed in this UNHCR article. "I want to be a neurosurgeon. I love science, and I know there aren't many female neurosurgeons in the region, but I believe in myself.")
While accomplishing these amazing feats, Jolie Pitt has had the time to get married, honeymoon in France, and film/write a feature film By the Sea.
The Academy Award winner set the film in the 70's with the main characters, Vanessa, a retired dancer, played by her, and Roland, a writer, played by her husband Brad Pitt, staying in an extravagantly beautiful French resort. Not much comes out of the trailer, either than the visible crumbling of the characters marriage and scenic clips of the Mediterranean coast in Malta.
The style of the movie is very much posh with a subtle undertone of bohemian. Jolie Pitts curled blonde tresses are shiny, but messily styled. Loose, day old looking waves frame her face, creating the appearance of a housewife in near derailment with shots of her gasping, crying, and screaming in the trailer.
It seems as if she plays another powerful character with a voice crippling itself to be heard, as in Clint Eastwood's Changeling and the film that sent her into stardom and acclamation: Girl, Interrupted. When you go through her filmography, you find that she plays her characters with passionate vulnerabilities and a strong willed determination. From super spy Evelyn Salt in Salt to drug addicted supermodel Gia Carangi in the biopic Gia. Her characters have stories to tell and aren't just some sort of twist on manic pixie love tales. They are real and raw and emotional and don't always have happy endings.
In middle school, a book that was in our reading curriculum was True Women, a large novel written by Janice Woods Windle. It told the true story of the author's heritage featuring women that lived in Texas during the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction Era. From what I can remember Windle visited our school for a chat on the book and the television movie that was developed for it. I think she had her husband or son there with her, but I really can't remember who the man was that was telling us this story about one of the leading actresses in the film: Angelina Jolie.
The man told us how she was so passionate about the character that she was playing, Georgia Virginia Lawshe Woods, that she asked to visit the grave that the real Georgia was buried in, with the author of the book and this man. When they drove there, she kneeled on the ground of the gravesite and simply sat there, with her eyes closed, feeling through the grass and dirt. She didn't say anything for a while, before she finally asked to go back with them to the set.
I'm not entirely sure if this story is 100% true, but I do know that I believe it. There are certain things that just sort of stick with you over time no matter what, and the image of Angelina Jolie crouched in a cemetery, feeling through mounds of dirt to connect to her character, is one of them for me.
xx
Liz
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