The Ballad of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio
The two legendary stars are finally coming together to costar in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.’ What can we learn from the roles that came before this glorious union?The Ballad of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio
The two legendary stars are finally coming together to costar in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.’ What can we learn from the roles that came before this glorious union?
This week marks the release of Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, director Quentin Tarantino’s ninth feature film. To celebrate, we’re looking back at the best of QT—the best scenes, the best stunts, the best dialogue. We’ll drill down on his extraordinary rise from video store clerk to filmmaking legend and talk to the man himself about his long career. Today, we look at the parallel careers of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, the costars of his latest movie, and what they could tell us about the film.
Hollywood is full of contradictions. Even as it relentlessly cultivates stars (and IP) to keep us watching, it also places these stars in competition with one another. Many compete, few thrive. The market correction theory (introduced by Wesley Morris), which states that two seemingly similar actors cannot reach the same level of success, explains the rise of certain performers and the quick disappearance or displacement of others: As Tom Hanks’s star rises, Michael Keaton’s inevitably falls.
Hollywood’s limited cast of characters also explains why it often takes years for certain equal-megawatt actors to work together: Although Robert De Niro and Al Pacino appeared as father and son in 1974’s The Godfather II, they shared the screen only when Francis Ford Coppola collapsed time in a beautiful crossfade; the two legendary actors had to wait 21 years to finally sit face-to-face in Michael Mann’s 1995 thriller Heat.
De Niro became a star thanks to Martin Scorsese (who is reuniting De Niro and Pacino this year in the $200 million Netflix extravaganza The Irishman), but in recent years, Scorsese has found himself a new leading man. Leonardo DiCaprio was an actor on the rise when he first worked with the director in 2002 on Gangs of New York, admittedly thanks to De Niro, who recommended the young actor after working with him on the 1993 film This Boy’s Life. But De Niro and DiCaprio have been reunited since then only in Scorsese’s 2015 commercial short film The Audition, promoting the Studio City Macau resort and casino. In the bizarre film, the actors play themselves as they compete for the same part in a fictional upcoming Scorsese project—but neither of them gets it. After seeing his face on digital billboards while dining with his increasingly belligerent favorite performers, Scorsese (also playing himself) decides to cast Brad Pitt. When they see the director auditioning Pitt, De Niro and DiCaprio abandon their quarrel to go to the spa.
The Audition is the first time that DiCaprio and Pitt appeared in a film together, yet just like De Niro and Pacino in The Godfather II, their scene didn’t allow them to exchange any dialogue. And within its narrative world, Pitt “won”; there could be only one blond leading man. But as amusing as Scorsese’s comic premise may be, it demands inevitable comparisons between DiCaprio and Pitt. Both actors are part of the small group of remaining bankable movie stars, vestiges of the 1990s when actors could arguably sell a film simply by slapping their faces on the poster (Pitt gives a soulful over-the-shoulder look on the promo sheet for James Gray’s upcoming Ad Astra). Yet the fact that they have so far appeared in only one short film together—to be pitted against each other in a parody of macho competition—would seem to indicate that the market struggles to choose one over the other. Hollywood would rather keep them apart to keep both their stars shining. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it took Quentin Tarantino to finally bring DiCaprio and Pitt together, using an impressively suggestive premise. In Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a struggling TV actor in 1969 Los Angeles, while Pitt is Cliff Booth, his long-time stuntman. The joke is also a metacommentary: To appear together, DiCaprio and Pitt must function as each other’s alter egos.
The greatest moment in the first teaser for Tarantino’s film is when Dalton starts weeping after a little girl—seemingly his scene partner—leans over and tells him, “That was the best acting I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” The satirical parallel with DiCaprio’s own bold efforts to win recognition for his talent—doing difficult accents in Gangs of New York and Blood Diamond, playing an extravagant real-life maniac in The Wolf of Wall Street, and finally getting his Oscar by fighting a bear in The Revenant—is undeniably purposeful, but this tearful release of anxiety is also representative of what DiCaprio does best. Throughout his career, he has proved particularly adept at playing men riddled with fear and struggling to conceal it, either with anger or overblown eccentricity.
“I have to say, your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now,” says Vera Farmiga’s psychologist, Madolyn, to her patient and soon-to-be-lover Billy (DiCaprio) in Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed. Billy, an undercover police officer required by his boss to see a shrink, had so far behaved horribly toward her, insulting her and her profession and violently slamming her door when leaving her office. But now, standing in her kitchen, he is calm and almost sheepish, his eyes wide with shyness but attentive to her reaction. Even a behavioral specialist like Madolyn is surprised by such a swift change, revealing as it does a pain and loneliness far deeper than she’d expected. The Departed may be DiCaprio’s best turn yet because, by design, it lets him be all different kinds of anxious. As a policeman trying to detach himself from his unlawful crime family, then having to plunge back into the underground scene as a mole for the police, he can rarely tell the truth. Billy’s instincts are his main chance at survival, but they also put him in danger of blowing his cover. When he punches a fellow gangster who has insulted him for drinking cranberry juice at the pub, he seems to lean into this typical gangster aggressiveness with eagerness: ironically, his cover as a bad boy lets him express himself more fully than his real identity as an officer. But soon enough, his gangster boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) himself realizes that this extreme violence in Billy comes not from a devotion to his cause, but rather from desperation and fear: Billy is overdoing it out of terror.
After receiving praise for shedding his Titanic-era matinee idol image, DiCaprio was increasingly drawn to tortured roles. Blood Diamond (2006) sees him play a regretful smuggler sacrificing himself for justice. In Scorsese’s Shutter Island, anxiety sinks into DiCaprio’s bones to make him fully lose it—on the prison island for the criminally insane, it’s his character Teddy Daniels who seems to be the most tense, as if buckling under the weight of some terrible, repressed knowledge. Hard to do more stressful than that film’s final twist, but it isn’t like DiCaprio not to try. If you start showing an interest in the dark side of human nature, it won’t be long before Christopher Nolan recruits you for one of his somber projects, and so DiCaprio led the director’s 2010 film, Inception, playing Cobb, a sort of spy of dreams (this film was way more complicated than I remembered). This time, anxious guilt manifests in the character’s subconscious as visions of Cobb’s dead wife appear in the dreamspaces he and his team created to manipulate people and “incept” in them certain ideas. In a reversal of Shutter Island’s plot twist, it is Cobb’s unfair feeling of responsibility for his wife’s suicide that makes him anxious, and this time, waking up to reality proves liberating (or does it?).
With his beautiful, perpetually youthful exterior and haunted psyche, it makes sense for DiCaprio to also often incarnate characters who play with appearances. Before the roleplay of The Departed, the more joyful gamesmanship of 2002’s Catch Me If You Can let Leo employ his looks to accumulate riches and experiences: As the real-life con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., he hops from one fresh-faced ideal to the next. In the 2010s the masks became uglier. His Calvin Candie, the slave owner of Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), has built himself a gilded bubble in which he can pretend to be a tasteful aristocrat, dressing himself and decorating his mansion with European style and insisting on being called Monsieur Candie despite not speaking French himself. So comfortable is he in his golden cage that he doesn’t realize that it is his chief black servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) who truly makes the rules under his roof. In his secluded self-delusion, Candie resembles The Great Gatsby, whom DiCaprio played the following year for Baz Luhrmann. Ever-distant and seemingly at peace, Gatsby can’t be protected by his wealth, and DiCaprio leans into the character’s tragic sense of waste. Jordan Belfort, however, will remain safe and happy as long as money rules the Western world. In Scorsese’s fact-based The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio plays the megalomaniac stockbroker with mad abandon, cutting an entertaining, coke-fueled figure while rendering the search for the character’s true self irrelevant. Belfort gave up on his insides a long time ago, replacing them with material possessions, drugs and women. It’s a grotesque tour de force for DiCaprio: Every shameless macho scream and bloated speech is there to stifle any remaining traces of a conscience.
In Bennett Miller’s 2011 film Moneyball, Brad Pitt’s Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane asks his new adviser, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), “Would you rather get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?” While it’s meant as a rhetorical question, DiCaprio’s choice would probably be to die slowly—for an actor of anxiety, extended pain is more cinematic. And so DiCaprio finally earned his Oscar dragging himself through the snow in The Revenant, with only his heartbreak and rage to keep him going. Pitt, on the other hand, is more of a sudden-death kinda guy. In the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008), he gets what Billy Beane deemed his preference. But, although brief, his last moment is Oscar-worthy in its own way: When his killer (George Clooney) opens the closet in which he is hiding, Pitt’s dumbo personal trainer, Chad, greets him with a swift and stupid grin, before getting his head blown off.
Even in the face of death, Pitt stays cool. He does so too when he is the face of Death, as in 1998’s bizarre Meet Joe Black. But this relaxation doesn’t mean he is unfeeling, on the contrary. Pitt plays Joe (a.k.a. Death) as a clueless but curious grown child, and when Joe tastes peanut butter for the first time, his eyes shine and he cracks a gigantic smile. Perfectly relaxed, Pitt is a vessel for unfiltered emotions, however odd they may look.
Unlike the ever-intense DiCaprio, Pitt approaches acting as an exercise in looseness; he seems to be testing just how unforced he can be while following the script he’s been given. Perhaps this explains his affinity for eating on screen: Between—or sometimes during —line deliveries, munching on a Twinkie (in Moneyball) or slurping noodles (in The Audition) may be his favorite actorly trick to keep himself lax. When you’re eating your soup, like his Jesse James does in one scene from the wonderful 2007 Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, you can’t focus on the other actors or even on your lines with too much nervousness. And when you look like Brad Pitt, eating and being nonchalant is actually attractive.
This ability to stay calm in whatever situation makes Pitt especially suitable to ensemble performances: s Danny Ocean’s right hand, Rusty Ryan, in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy, he smoothly does his part(s) in the heists, impersonating different people and eating constantly. As a team leader, however, Pitt can be rather confounding, either in an appealing or an upsetting way. His collectedness turns menacing in Jesse James, and reinforces the mythical aura of the character—a legendary status that leads to his downfall when a disappointed fan, played by Casey Affleck with a mounting anxiety in contrast with Pitt, decides to kill his hero. At first, Billy Beane’s colleagues have enough respect and admiration for him to let him adopt his mysterious new, stat-based recruitment tactics, but when the results aren’t good enough, Beane’s (and Pitt’s) perpetual ease becomes irritating for everyone—including himself. Moneyball may contain Pitt’s greatest performance because of how internal it is, and how much it challenges his natural cool. Unwilling to let himself get sentimental about his team, Billy hits the gym during each game (he has to keep himself busy but it would be unhealthy to just eat for three hours straight); but as the stakes keep rising, his curiosity takes over. Pitt grows restless but timidly so, as though he didn’t know what to do with his unruly emotions. After taking a breath on his training machine, he suddenly, almost reluctantly, lifts up the remote to turn the TV on and listen to the game commentary.
Like DiCaprio, Pitt isn’t afraid of stretching himself with weird accents, but he’s often tempted to take them even further into camp territory. His Southern slang as Lieutenant Aldo Raine in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is pronounced, but so is his behavior. As the Lieutenant tells his men, “We’re gonna be doing one thang and one thang only … killin’ Nazis.” It’s a simple direction, with no exceptions. Aldo is a great leader because his rage and his acceptance of death are so evident in his swagger. He’s honest and determined; even more than Jesse James, he inspires in his soldiers a devotion that becomes a delicious death wish. Pitt’s effect is similar if less extreme in Adam McKay’s The Big Short. Two years after DiCaprio became the hero of all financiers, Pitt played one of their sharpest critics, the elusive ex-trader Ben Rickert. Something of a legendary punk, Rickert cares much more about the market’s upcoming crash than his own success and likability. Pitt here is at his most antisocial level of odd and distant—but his avoidant behavior is captivating.
While DiCaprio is particularly touching when his tension explodes into tears, Pitt’s vulnerability shows up when he tenses up and stops playing it cool. This could explain why, a year after anxious Leo played a mad slave owner, chill Brad interpreted peaceful Canadian, antislavery carpenter Bass in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. His typical ease and detachment are contrived when he decides to help Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) regain his freedom. In his ex-wife Angelina Jolie’s 2015 film By the Sea, Pitt’s character, Roland, faces the resentment that his wife, Vanessa (Jolie), has built against him over years of neglect and silence: He has to let down his defenses and feel his and her pain so they can reunite (much as they both had to be honest secret spies to preserve their marriage in Mr. and Mrs. Smith 10 years prior).
Pitt’s masculine confidence makes him a wildly different family man on screen from DiCaprio. Pitt’s wives don’t all die, for starters. While only 11 years younger, DiCaprio has preserved a youthful rebelliousness that makes him appealing in a dangerous way, as in The Departed; with his aversion to stress and conflict (eating is a deflecting tactic), Pitt on the other hand seems more old-fashioned, All-American (see: Aldo), and sage. His classical handsomeness feeds the impression that he is the Ideal Husband and Father—responsible, slightly distant, and captivating. In David Fincher’s 2008 magical realist epic The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pitt literally appears wise beyond his years, starting life as an old man and dying a baby. In the film’s middle section, when his real and physical age match and he looks as old as his lover Daisy (Cate Blanchett), Benjamin looks at their reflection in her dance studio’s mirror to “remember us just as we are now,” a fleeting moment that’s truly heartbreaking. His adult appearance has allowed him to grow up fast and appreciate the brevity of life; he’s had to stop being detached. Pitt’s quiet watchfulness here is striking in contrast with the keyed-up work he did for Fincher back in Se7en and Fight Club, in which his characters were so much more resistant to or ignorant of the finitude of life.
In Terrence Malick’s 2011 epic The Tree of Life, Pitt’s patriarch does learn this lesson, but very late. While Benjamin Button provides a rare example of biology in reverse, Mr. O’Brien represents, in his solid, domineering manner, “the way of nature,” as opposed to his wife’s stated preference for the way of grace—the difference, perhaps, between reality and a religious ideal. In Malick’s spiritually anguished coming-of-age fable, O’Brien believes he should endure and be respected because he is the fittest (in every sense of the term), but eventually, he admits his mistake, to his son and to the audience: “I wanted to be loved ’cause I was great, a Big Man. Now I’m nothing. Look. The glory around ... trees, birds ... I dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory. A foolish man.” Pitt’s free-floating attitude here betrays a fear of attachment to the world around him, whereas DiCaprio’s intensity in his roles comes from the knowledge that he can’t ever fully distance himself from everything, be it his past, his circumstances, or the people around him.
Tarantino’s casting of these two drastically different screen personae as each other’s substitutes in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood is brilliant. With his charged charisma, DiCaprio certainly can play an ambitious and frustrated actor, one who needs someone like Pitt—more muscular, relaxed, and satisfied with anonymity—to do his action shots for him. In Moneyball, Beane explains: “Listen, man. I’ve been in this game a long time. I’m not in it for a record, I’ll tell you that. I’m not in it for a ring. That’s when people get hurt.” Accordingly, Pitt has only ever won an Oscar as a producer, on 12 Years a Slave. These two actors’ careers correspond to each other, and in their contrasts help us make sense of how American cinema and screen acting, despite being often limiting, can let different actors’ (and directors’) sensibilities flourish. DiCaprio and Pitt tell the story of what happened—and is still happening, despite all the expanded universes—once upon a time in Hollywood, then and now.
Manuela Lazic is a French writer based in London who primarily covers film.