Double Take - Brad Pitt and 12 Years A Slave

12 Years a Slave is a gorgeous, powerful film in which nearly every piece reaches out to stun and touch the audience. I say nearly because there is one bit that very noticeably does not work. His name is Brad Pitt.

After skyrocketing to fame in the 1990s and weathering quite a scandal in the early 2000s, in recent years, Brad Pitt has been settling comfortably into the role of one of the esteemed elder statesmen of film. Lately he’s been talked about more for his red carpet appearances with his humanitarian wife and their brood, than for the films those appearances are promoting. Brad Pitt is undeniably a fixture of American pop culture (a glamorous, golden-haired fixture) but the question is, as always, can he act?

Judging by his performance in 12 Years, I’m going to have to say – maybe not anymore. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. 12 Years a Slave tells the story of Solomon Northup, a freedman who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south where he is pushed around from plantation to plantation into the hands of ever-worsening masters. In the film, Brad Pitt has a small but pivotal role as Samuel Bass, a hired hand who works with Northup in the last plantation. Bass manages to get word to Northup’s friends in the North, single-handedly ending his ordeal.

The most obvious problem with Bass is his look. I mean, in the critical last act of a movie, I shouldn’t have to spend brain power thinking about where some random field hand managed to find a flat-iron and a salon to put in blond highlights. Everyone in the film is carefully made up and styled to fit into director Steve McQueen’s perfectly constructed 19^th century world, except for Brad Pitt who stubbornly looks just like well, Brad Pitt. It is as if he wandered right off the red carpet and onto the screen, stopping only to swap his shirt for a mildly sweatier one.

The character is also insistently one dimensional. When Bass confronts the evil plantation owner, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), he shows stiff resolve and heroic courage with little to no regard for the fact that it is Epps who pays his wages. It’s completely unbelievable; this is supposed to be a traveling worker who needs to take odd jobs to survive, but he decides to jeopardize his living in order to have an ideological argument with his boss, a man he knows to be unbalanced. I won’t blame Pitt for Bass’ ridiculous speech (what are the chances that this man feels so passionately about the immorality of slavery in that day and age?), but I will blame him for delivering it without any thought of approaching nuance. You don’t get the sense that Bass has any deep feelings regarding slavery or that he’s considered how he might be hurting himself by protesting against it. Instead, Pitt plays him as “the good guy” and that is the only explanation for why he has such noble thoughts. I’m sorry, but that just isn’t enough.

Bass’ one-dimensionality hurts the story in a fundamental way; it removes suspense from the climax. Solomon Northup had already trusted one white man to help him before Bass. That man betrayed him, nearly resulting in Northup’s murder by his master. Therefore, when the pattern began to repeat itself in the final act, the audience should’ve been watching with baited breath, wondering whether Bass, too, would turn on the protagonist and give him away to Epps. However, Pitt squishes any uncertainty with his anachronistically manicured Hollywood hands. He leaves no room for doubt; he is only the beneficent carpenter (wink wink) and certainly nothing more. Would a man so golden-haired, so passionate in his defense of justice turn on our hero? The answer is very obviously no, and that makes for a rather undramatic finale.

Samuel Bass is an absolutely critical character in 12 Years a Slave and Brad Pitt was horribly miscast in the role. In the hands of another actor, it might have been a fascinating part, a study of a moral man trying to do what’s right against his own self-interest. A better actor could’ve raised the tensions in the last sequence, made the audience hope and pray that he would not betray the poor, battered Northup. Instead, we got Brad Pitt, who proved that, even if he once could act, he certainly isn’t trying very hard now. He is content to look unrealistically pretty and spout obvious moral truths, without bothering to flesh out his character at all. Let’s just say, when the credits started and the text announced that the movie had been produced by one Brad Pitt, a lot of things suddenly made a lot more sense.