Commentary: Brad Pitt Succeeds As Both A Winner And A Loser
by Frank Martin
At this point, there’s no denying that Brad Pitt has had a long acting career. His list of credits includes some incredible films. Fight Club and Troy are amongst some of the best in his filmography, and yet he embodied two very different roles in each of them. Usually, actors get fit into a specific box. They are either champions who always come out on top or underdogs who take a beating. Pitt takes on both of these roles in each film and succeeds at both.
Troy is, of course, an adaptation Homer‘s The Iliad. Pitt plays the legendary warrior Achilles, who comes to Troy hoping for glory and greatness. As the story plays out, he is eventually slain after being weakened by an arrow to his heel. Before this happens, he slaughters many soldiers and racks up quite the body count without taking much damage, if any.
By contrast, Fight Club is a psychological thriller where the actor plays Tyler Durden, a man who rejects the consumer lifestyle of late 1990s dull society. He ends up recruiting an army of followers that goes on to perform mischievous terrorist acts. Tyler gathers these followers by organizing an underground fight club. He sometimes wins these fights, but Tyler also loses very badly, sometimes taking a brutal beating that leaves him appearing near death.
Besides the genre and time period in which they take place, Troy and Fight Club couldn’t be further from one another, but it can still be beneficial to compare Pitt’s performance in both. Troy sets him up as a handsome champion who defeats every warrior placed in front of him. Achilles kills with ease, and other fighters struggle to even lay a scratch on him. Likewise, it’s hard to count the number of punches Tyler Durden takes in Fight Club. In one film, Pitt’s character draws strength from being untouchable. In the other, his charisma comes from his ability to take a beating. His followers rally around him not because of his wins but by how badly he can lose and keep going. And each performance shows the versatility of the actor.
Fight Club is now streaming on HBO Max.