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"FacebookPinterest\n\nBrad Pitt is turning 50 today, and what's so remarkable about that? Not much, except that few people who can remember the piece of indolent eye taffy Pitt was 20-plus years ago would have bet on him to hold our interest for two decades and counting. Let alone that he'd mature into one hell of an actor after spending his early career mostly looking bemused that he had one. Or that he'd turn out to have brains\u2014so far as I can tell, the actor and the producer in him function in notably astute tandem\u2014along with an inquisitive enough temperament to help some mighty interesting movies get bankrolled by agreeing to star in them.\u00A0\n\nTrue, even early on, Pitt was never completely feckless. He had an instinctive sense of the camera and knew how to use his eyes and smile to mess with almost any scene's tempo by introducing an entertaining element of languor. But in the roles that first made people notice him\u2014as the amusingly role-reversed male sex object in Ridley Scott's feminocentric Thelma And Louise, as the beneficiary of director Robert Redford's \"I was once young like you\" narcissism in A River Runs Through It\u2014he could also coast on his looks and effortless magnetism, and coast he often did. A lot of the time, his performances just looked awfully lazy, something also true of his pal George Clooney in those days.\n\nMaybe they ended up egging each other on, who knows? It's still striking that in midlife they've become the canny, thoughtful performers they are. On top of that, they came up in a movie era that valued eternal boyishness over rough-hewn manliness\u2014the boyishness their near contemporary Tom Cruise, say, won't shake off until he's 70, if then. Pitt and Clooney, on the other hand, are now our time's two most satisfying embodiments of old-school screen masculinity, meaning the kind that looks deeply marked by experience, reflectiveness and all sorts of stuff the dudes they play have decided to keep to themselves.\n\nThe first sign that Pitt had more on the ball than Tom Cruise was probably when he used his star clout to lobby for retaining the grisly ending of David Fincher's Seven in the face of studio heebie-jeebies. As it happens, I'm no fan of Seven, which\u2014like Silence of The Lambs, whose success it obviously meant to replicate\u2014struck me then and does now as a hunk of puerile exploitativeness gussied up to look like it's got class, depth and a bunch of other qualities it doesn't. Even so, Pitt was right: Any other ending but the one he and Fincher wanted would have been a cop-out. And what's more, audiences would have known it.\n\nNonetheless, when Pitt was in his thirties and even early forties, there was still something unformed about him. His calfy-eyed handsomeness got in the way even when he tried to do interesting things, from Fight Club\u2014a work of definite non-genius in my book, but a tricky part for him anyway\u2014to Interview With The Vampire, one of those movies in which just about everyone seems miscast. (Big exception, or rather pint-sized one: then 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst.) A generation earlier, his fellow \"More than just a pretty face, but how much more?\" marquee name Warren Beatty had faced a similar problem as he got older\u2014Heaven Can Wait was his equivalent of Meet Joe Black\u2014but then again, Beatty had produced and starred in Bonnie And Clyde at the age of 29. People had to take him seriously after that, not an obligation anybody felt when it came to Brad Pitt's career. And becoming half of Brangelina, despite guaranteeing his and their celebrity until the Third World runs out of kids for her to adopt, didn't exactly add credibility to the mix.\n\nAs entertaining as the Ocean's 11 franchise was\u2014the first and third installments, anyhow, though not the crapaholic middle panel\u2014it also let Pitt and Clooney slide back into their old lazybones ways, not without an undertone of smugness that didn't sit well. But a very different sort of ensemble project\u20142006's Babel\u2014marked a turning point for Pitt. Not only was he completely convincing as a distraught American tourist trying to keep his wife (Cate Blanchett) from dying in North Africa, but that eternally youthful face of his had turned seasoned and evocative. Then 43, he was a grown-up at last\u2014and about time, too.\n\nSince then, he's never been predictable. In The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Pitt was unexpectedly authoritative as a tuckered-out, burdened Western outlaw trying to create a middle-class life for himself at the unwitting end of his days. He backslid badly with Fincher's inane The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, whose fantasy of reversing the aging process was an ultra-Hollywoodish notion of something everybody could identify with (we didn't). But then came Inglourious Basterds, with Pitt's jocularly brutal Lt. Aldo Raine as the ideal expression of Quentin Tarantino's mania for turning cartoon figures hyperbolic and hilarious at once. Best of all was his towering performance as a 1950s husband and father\u2014maybe the ultimate screen portrait of a midcentury dad\u2014in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, and it says a lot for Pitt's maturity as an actor that he thrives on playing family men. Most male stars in his league avoid domesticity like the plague: They'd rather play loners any old day. But that's an awfully callow notion of meaningful truth-telling.\n\nPitt, by contrast, now excels at the ordinary\u2014men defined by their jobs and attachments, not their inner Travis Bickle. The beauty of his performance as Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane in Moneyball was that everything from his body language to his speech rhythms conveyed an understanding of how the Billy Beanes of this world don't see themselves as glamorous or even unusual; being good at something they love is all the validation they need. Pitt even humanized World War Z by turning it into a story about a guy tussling with the conflicting demands of work and family\u2014and, in his role as producer, presumably cast the decisive vote in scrapping the movie's climactic zombie battle in favor of a tense, protracted sequence that focused on the hero's determination to find a magic bullet. That brainy stroke alone put World War Z head and shoulders above most of last summer's demolition-derby blockbusters.\n\nOne reason it was an impressive call was that Pitt plainly knew it was about time he delivered a big moneymaker to shore up his A-list status. Something else Clooney and he have in common is that their star wattage is out of proportion to how most of their movies perform at the box office, and he can't do The Tree of Life every time if he wants to keep nabbing magazine covers. But so far, Pitt's been doing an uncommonly shrewd job of staying in the limelight while satisfying his creative ambitions, and watching how he sustains that over the next decade or so isn't going to be boring. No one would have guessed that midlife would be his prime, but it is. So, as he hits the half-century mark, a chorus of \"And many more\" wouldn't be at all out of place."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-at-50-notes-on-a-career-no-one-ever-guessed-hed-have>