“Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the 2005 action comedy that gave the world Brangelina, wasn’t a great movie but it did satisfy audiences by introducing a couple with combustible chemistry in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who hooked up in real life while the film was in production.
A decade later, these tabloid hall-of-famers are finally back to share the screen in “By the Sea’’ — glumly emoting in a pretentiously arty, humorless vanity production that drags along for two hours that feel like at least four.
In addition to acting and directing, Jolie Pitt (as she now bills herself) has provided reams of stilted, on-the-nose dialogue and more pregnant pauses than a season of Harold Pinter plays.
She and Pitt play Vanessa and Roland, who check into a hotel in a small, gorgeous French resort town in the distant, pre-cellphone past — the early ’70s, based on Pitt’s mustache and sideburns, plus a glimpse of a magazine cover with Pat Nixon.
This rich and glamorous couple is too preoccupied with themselves to care about the Vietnam War or anything going on in the world, though.
They’ve journeyed from their New York home for an extended stay after a traumatic event that has left dancer Vanessa a glamorous, self-medicating zombie who spends her days sunbathing in large hat and apparently applying makeup with a trowel.
Roland is a blocked novelist who gives Vanessa, who turns away all of his overtures, plenty of space to grieve.
He spends most of his time getting blitzed, taking his meals at a cafe down the hill from their hotel and talking with the sympathetic owner (Niels Arestrup), who lost his wife a year earlier.
After nearly an hour of this sheer ennui, young honeymooners (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) check into the room next door. Vanessa starts watching their vigorous attempts at getting the bride pregnant through a peephole between their rooms.
Eventually Vanessa invites the perpetually soused Roland to join in her voyeurism — a scene that generated not a few unintended giggles at the screening I attended.
Soon this imitation F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald start hanging out with their neighbors — at a restaurant, on a boat — which begins to thaw out their own relationship. At least until Roland and Vanessa both become jealous that the other lusts after their younger and more carefree counterparts.
“By the Sea’’ is clearly intended to be an homage to classic European films of the ’60s and ’70s, but the stars’ performances and the thin script are too superficial to make you care about their characters.
What’s left in this curious exercise in leveraging star power is a lot of pretty scenery (filmed in Malta) and a last-minute reveal unwisely borrowed from Edward Albee.