In the streaming era, maybe the surest sign of star power isn’t the ability to get people to show up at a movie theater just to see them, but the ability to get people to circle back and watch your biggest bombs en masse on Netflix. If that’s the case, Angelina Jolie has just performed a major flex: Her 2002 film Life, or Something Like It, which grossed a princely $14 million back in 2002, has been on the Netflix Top 10 charts for over a week. Among its wide-release corporate siblings from Fox that year, it grossed slightly less than Solaris, a downbeat sci-fi movie that received an “F” from CinemaScore. (Even if you don’t know what CinemaScore is, you can ascertain that an “F” is really bad.) It’s one of her lowest-grossing wide releases as a grown-up movie star – something she’s now been for a quarter of a century.
And Jolie undoubtedly remains a major name, almost universally recognizable. She would have to be, to get anyone to press play on Life, or Something Like It, a movie that is otherwise written and paced like a cheap Sundance life-affirmer, complete with former Brother McMullen Edward Burns as the love interest. Jolie plays Lanie Kerrigan, a TV reporter whose life (or something like it, in this case a very bad movie) is thrown into a tizzy when a homeless man (Tony Shalhoub) predicts that she will die within a week – alongside several other predictions that come swiftly and precisely true.
That’s basically the whole meandering movie: Lanie spends a week having soul-searching conversations about what it all means, because a magical poor person predicted she might die. It’s barely enough to sustain a sitcom episode, yet each individual scene seems to last at least 22 minutes apiece, bending space and time to somehow only add up to 103 minutes total. There are several unmotivated split diopter shots, though; that’s about all the movie has to offer beyond the mere sight of Jolie, who was not exactly born to play a bubbly, superficial TV reporter who love-hates Edward Burns. Maybe the movie is secretly compatible with the Netflix spirit; director Stephen Herek also made last year’s straight-to-the-service holiday rom-com Our Little Secret, similarly designed with an undemanding appeal, in this case to viewers who will watch anything starring Lindsay Lohan and/or a Christmas tree.
In any case, it’s an artifact from a time when Jolie was less scarce on movie screens; though this was her only 2002 release, it was sandwiched between two Tomb Raider installments, and part of a post-Oscar period where she appeared in nine movies over the course of five years. These days, she takes multi-year breaks in between projects – and as it happens, her newest movie is on Netflix, too. Maria, in which she plays opera singer Maria Callas in her last days, premiered on the service last fall, on its way to a presumed Oscar nomination, which did not materialize, suggesting that maybe even Oscar voters watching a star play another star are nostalgic for earlier Angelina.
Interestingly, both Life and Maria feature Jolie as a woman of some renown (moreso in the latter, obviously) re-examining herself with greater awareness of her mortality. It’s a worthy subject for an actress who has seemed increasingly regal, sometimes downright remote, in recent years. Her signature post-2010 role is as the misunderstood lady wizard Maleficent, a slight shift from her 2000s interest in action heroines and/or noble suffering. Her Maria Callas is more knowing, more rueful, even playful, about her losses, even if that’s to disguise a certain degree of wounded ego. The movie plays with Jolie’s imperious glamour as well as the slyness that made her such an alluring figure in youth, before she so often played some form of superhuman. For that matter, Lanie the careerist reporter certainly has a more approachable rom-com vibe than whoever that Salt character was, even if that vibe feels profoundly more effortful when Jolie isn’t beating the hell out of people.
So what’s the mainstream Jolie canon, anyway, after 25 years in the spotlight? What are Netflix viewers hoping for when they stumble into Life, or Something Like It? Girl, Interrupted belongs in the Jolie pantheon, for sure; it won her an Oscar. Mr. & Mrs. Smith isn’t a great movie (honestly it’s the rare instance where the TV show is better), but it will live forever as a particular image of the eventually-fraught relationship between Jolie and Brad Pitt. Maleficent probably counts. Tomb Raider and Salt were hits, though they don’t feel as well-loved as the Harrison Ford movies they resemble. Part of Jolie’s appeal is that her mystique has managed to consistently transcend her actual movies. Maybe it’s that amorphous quality to Jolie’s stardom – the globally famous megastar in search of the right vehicle – that’s led fans to circle back to this mostly-wrong one.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
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