Brad Pitt’s man-bites-fans hit
The meme “Tell us you’re a liberal without telling us you’re a liberal” applies to Brad Pitt’s rugged yet sentimental characterization in Heart of the Beast. Pitt portrays James Belmont — a 30-year Special Forces veteran of both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars — who trusts only his canine companion, Odin, an amputated German shepherd. Belmont’s weariness is built into this story of a reclusive personality’s singular commitment, which reflects the incompatible social contact of recent years.
This post-Covid survival tale extends six-feet distancing (Belmont and Odin fly a Cessna for relaxation in the Alaskan wilderness) to portray personal detachment from the troubled social interaction we know too well. Their isolation is unexpected from a movie star like Pitt, who is defined by our desire to enjoy his company. This is where the betrayal occurs. A few combat flashbacks don’t give Pitt’s Belmont the same trauma that was dramatized in American Sniper or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Instead, director David Ayers distracts from patriotism and distills antisocial behavior to man-under-pressure practicality. It’s another variation on Ayers’s usual cynicism, as seen in his previous movies End of Watch, Fury, and The Beekeeper.
Belmont is the ultimate representation of that liberal sanctimony called “sacrificial empathy.” He endures hardship, even an apparent heart attack, yet perseveres to save Odin in harsh weather, on rocky terrain, even underwater. The premise is Disneyesque — Old Yeller without childhood’s natural ultra–Humane Society simplicity. Such sympathy also suffused Paul Walker’s film Eight Below (2006), an affable modern example of classic man-to-animal Samaritanism. The late blue-eyed blond Walker was the only modern actor who could rival Pitt’s movie-star aura, and Eight Below increased the charisma factor by the eight sled dogs Walker had to protect in the Antarctic. Heart of the Beast, being set in Alaska, is closer to home, closer to idealizing the issue of social isolation.
Without explicating the parallels to military service as dutiful sacrifice, Heart of the Beast dramatizes masculine instinct. Pitt’s Belmont comes closer to that other talented, glamorous liberal paragon Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. Belmont’s do-gooder survivalist exploits include trekking across miles of wilderness, confronting a huge grizzly bear, and we also see Odin’s bravery against a wolf pack. This highpoint imitates The Revenant’s ferocious grizzly-bear centerpiece and, of course, concludes satisfactorily.
Pitt and Ayers give us a repetitive, breath-baiting workout, then lay on comfy, man-to-animal camaraderie that it redefines as man-and-beast kinship. This maudlin development is a reminder of Pitt’s frequent deceitfulness: from the career-climbing low trash of True Romance to the genuine movie-star shine he gave to the high-brow trash of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Meet Joe Black; from the violent sedition of Mr. & Mrs. Smith to the bold, anti-Obama cynicism of Killing Them Softly; from the piety of Moneyball to the common-man heroism of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; and yet act as producer of the most condescending liberal crap, 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight.
This movie-star cunning is a phenomenon of the millennium in which celebrities attempt to join political fashion while satisfying popular opinion. In this man-loves-dog story, Pitt’s animal husbandry counters Dr. Fauci’s abominable beagle-testing, but then Pitt bites his most susceptible, adoring fans.
As Heart of the Beast develops its most commercial aspect — the wounded-warrior bond between Belmont and Odin — it recalls the anthropomorphic genius of Jack London’s Call of the Wild in which an animal’s psyche expresses scarily recognizable human traits and behavior.
Reviewers’ praise of the heart-warming friendliness of Belmont and Odin’s relationship recalls Chelsea Clinton’s patronizing commentary in PBS’s Great American Read. London’s masterpiece, she said, misinterpreting him, is about “the presence or absence of love or nurture in our lives, how love really is eternal in its purest form.” Stupefyingly, she concluded that Call of the Wild teaches that “it is so important to treat each other with kindness, compassion, respect, decency, love.” Too many film actors play this game. Brad Pitt’s rough-edged but similar cuddliness in Heart of the Beast betrays London’s powerful art and reveals his own movie-star duplicity.
