Angelina Jolie's Hollywood exile

One of the best examples of the jujitsu Jolie can do on our attitudes toward movie sexuality was her performance in the elegant thriller "Original Sin," released in 2001. Instantly dismissed by critics -- the fate of almost any film done in an odd style by an unknown director -- "Original Sin" deserves a second look, particularly for the performances of Jolie and the sweetly reticent Antonio Banderas. Directed by Michael Cristofer, the playwright ("Shadow Box") who had previously directed Jolie in "Gia," "Original Sin" is a wonderful piece of stylish trash ("I loved it," Kael wrote on the envelope when she returned the copy I loaned her) made from the noir mystery "Waltz Into Darkness," by the cult favorite Cornell Woolrich (best known as the author of the story that became Hitchcock's "Rear Window"). "Waltz Into Darkness" had been filmed before, most notably by François Truffaut in 1969 under the title "Mississippi Mermaid," starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. Woolrich's novel, set in late 19th century New Orleans, is about a widower who takes a chance on a mail-order bride who turns out to be an enigmatic adventuress -- like all men in these kinds of stories, he is pulled into a web of deceit and murder.

Cristofer relocates the story to late 19th century Havana (actually shot in Mexico), probably to take advantage of the location and also to accommodate Banderas' accent. Retooling the script around his female star, Cristofer retains its lurid pulp quality but turns the femme fatale theme on its head by letting Jolie's character dominate the plot midway through the film. She stops being the victim or fantasy figure associated with the genre and becomes the protagonist. Jolie is terrific playing a character for which there is almost no movie precedent (the great Deneuve, in Truffaut's version, played the role as the classic shallow man-trap). She is a woman who has suffered through every form of degradation, committed the grossest of crimes, and still believes in the possibilities of dignity and love. (In one remarkable scene, facing gang rape from vengeful gamblers whom she has cheated, she glares at her attackers as if to deny them, at least, the pleasure of seeing her suffer.)

"Original Sin" is often scary stuff, particularly in scenes that look as if they were intended to reflect the dark corners of Jolie's psyche. For instance, a scene in which she bonds with a lover performing a ritual with knives, a practice Jolie had often discussed in interviews. And in a sly joke, concealed from all but those who happen to catch it in the credits, the character of Satan in a stage production who is also her lover is played by her brother, James Haven. It's as if Jolie was giving the finger to a press that foamed at the mouth when she told the world how much she loved her brother after winning the Oscar.

If "Original Sin" had been a thriller in the traditional mode, it might have been a success, but critics and audiences alike were jolted by its weirder aspects and by the ways in which it subverted the noir themes -- in other words, for probably the precise reasons that Jolie was drawn to the material in the first place.

It isn't so much that most of her other movies have been bad as the way in which they are bad. The writing in American movies has never been more abysmal, the characters not really written but sketched into what is always an action or sex comedy framework. (Nearly all Hollywood films are action movies or sex comedies; "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" tries to up the ante by splicing the genres.) Real actors must essentially do the work that screenwriters used to do and create their own characters from whole cloth. (Mike Newell, who directed one of her best roles in "Pushing Tin," conceded, "There really wasn't much there on the page for her character. She filled in the blanks.") Jolie has done this in a long series of films that are notable mostly for her performances, movies that you might not see at all if you didn't stumble on them while perusing the vast left field of cable TV. The combination of the young Jolie and Joyce Carol Oates' unsparing novel about a high school girl gang should have produced a film that made her the James Dean of the '90s. If the rest of "Foxfire" (1996) has been as tough as her portrayal of "Legs" Sadovsky it would have, but the script's touchy-feely mode was at odds with Oates' and Jolie's edges. Her best role and her best performance before "Gia" was in "George Wallace," John Frankenheimer's fine, too-little-seen television biography of the Alabama governor, in which Jolie played a status-hungry Southern girl forced into maturity when her husband is paralyzed by an assassin's bullet.

It's intriguing to think what directions Jolie's career might have gone in had she hooked up with a strong director like Frankenheimer at an earlier age. Meanwhile, we're left to wonder why Hollywood's best directors don't get off their asses and build projects around the movies' most exciting actress. Can't Martin Scorsese see that Jolie's energy is precisely the cure for the slack in his recent work? (Jolie would have ignited the role of Jenny, the pickpocket, in "Gangs of New York," but she would have looked as if she could have eaten Leonardo DiCaprio alive. Imagine if she had been paired off with Daniel Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher!) What's wrong with Quentin Tarantino? Can't he see that his work is now feeding off of itself and that what he needs to recharge is a dynamo like Jolie?

This woman has much to tell us about our fantasies, fears and aspirations. But she can't do it through the medium of supermarket tabloids. Are America's best male filmmakers afraid, perhaps, that Angelina Jolie unleashed would threaten their status as auteurs? Because she would, you know.

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