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Angelina Jolie has played all kinds of characters throughout her career, from video game heroines and wicked witches to a tiger and Maria Callas (not in the same film, sadly). Outside of acting, she puts other celebrities to shame with her relentless philanthropic efforts, which, at this point, are about as highly publicised as her acting career.
Because of this (and her marriage and divorce from Brad Pitt that has kept the paparazzi fed and healthy for more than two decades), it’s easy to forget just how serious of an actor Jolie is. One director even compared her to James Dean. Think of movies like Girl, Interrupted and Gia. She can be an electric force on screen, and it’s no small feat that she became one of the first female action stars.
In all the years that she’s been on screen, though, Jolie has been in plenty of duds, too, and it just so happens that one of those duds required her to play a character she absolutely despised. 2002’s Life or Something Like It is a mystery. The plot isn’t a mystery; it’s just a mystery as to why it ever got made. Jolie plays a shallow TV personality who interviews a homeless psychic who tells her that she is going to die in a week. Even soap opera writers would roll their eyes at it.
For Jolie, though, the problem was with the character. In an interview, she said that she hated everything the fictional woman stood for. “Who she is through the majority of the movie is the kind of person I find sad and I can’t stand,” she said.
Adding, “Someone who’s really self-centred and really focused on just superficial material things, it’s just awful, it’s a horrible thing.” The same could be said of the movie itself.
Sure, the character’s no angel, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have been played in a properly compelling way. Just take Nicole Kidman in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For from ’95. She took on an even nastier role – a TV presenter so obsessed with fame and control she’s happy to kill for it – and ended up delivering one of the strongest performances of her whole career.
Then again, actors can only do so much with the material they are given. Kidman’s performance is masterful, but she had a good script to draw upon. Jolie, on the other hand, was saddled with the sort of rom-com quips and Hallmark “Home is where the heart is” tosh that would make Meryl Streep look like an amateur. With this in mind, Jolie really didn’t deserve the Razzie nomination she got for the part.
Not surprisingly, Life or Something Like It failed to find its audience, and it made less than half its budget back at the box office. It wasn’t the only romantic comedy featuring a big star to crash and burn in 2002.
That year, Madonna fouled the screen with Swept Away, and Hugh Grant showed his true villainous colours in the very un-romantic romantic comedy Two Weeks Notice. Jolie’s efforts were stellar by comparison.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source faroutmagazine.co.uk ’
