Exploring Michael Pitt's Unique Early Film Roles | www.Rhetter.com

 

Michael Pitt in Dawson's Creek in 1999, via iMDB

    I remember back in 2019 I binged watched every single episode; every single second of the WB teen drama series 'Dawson Creek'. And even right now thinking of Dawson's Creek makes me want to have a panic attack because of how fast time has gone since that particular and strangely nostalgic time three years ago. Well, I remember while watching the show I was also incredibly into the movies Bully, and The Dreamers, both of which star Michael Pitt and were two of his earliest lead roles in major motion pictures. I was just sort of in awe at how diverse a lot of these roles were, and how nearly perfect they were portrayed by Pitt that I decided to watch a handful of his other early film works (and read about some without watching them hahaha) and I'm here now to go through them with you and let you know what's cool about them or why I think they're so unique.

1. Finding Forrester | dir. by Gus Van Sant | release date: December 12, 2000

    Written by Mike Rich (The Rookie; Cars 3 if this info is relevant to anyone) and directed by legend himself Gus Van Sant, Finding Forrester was one I did not watch but find it incredible that Michael Pitt was involved with this film. I think it may be the thought of him working with such a great and honored director that excites me (wait until I hear about Gus Van Sant's Last Days), but after reading the synopsis I passed on watching it as I deemed there were others that were better. Not to say this is a bad film at all, it did raise eighty million dollars on a forty million dollar budget, but Pitt's role isn't big enough to catch my attention. His role as Coleridge was a very minor one; Pitt did get to be onscreen with Sean Connery and Busta Rhymes, so that's a plus.

2. Hedwig and the Angry Inch | dir. by John Cameron Mitchell | release date: September 12, 2001

    While almost everyone I've ever met besides the guys down at the movie theater have never heard of this movie, they would also possibly shit bricks if they were to know that it actually originally was an award winning off-Broadway musical that (just like the movie) was written and starring John Cameron Mitchell, who as you can see also directed the film version of the play.

John Cameron Mitchell and Michael Pitt in Hedwig, via Letterboxd

    Mitchell plays a genderqueer woman from East Germany who has a love and passion for rock music and is deceived by her ex-boyfriend that steals and plagiarizes her music and the music they wrote together that Hedwig does not get credit or royalties for. Hedwig was once actually a gay teenager named Hansel Schmidt who falls in love with an American army soldier named Luther, and since they couldn't get married as two men, they had to get Hansel a gender reassignment surgery and change his name to his mothers name, which of course is Hedwig. Which to me sounds just as much of a guys name as it is a woman's. Like, more common.

    Hedwig's future ex-boyfriend I mentioned earlier is named Tommy Gnosis and is played by... you guessed it, Michael Pitt. Pitt killed this roll, especially because of his musical background and the fact that he can actually sing and play guitar. He was only 19 when this movie was being filmed, which only goes to show his acting chops are excellent and have no limits; even as a young rising star at the time he pushed whatever boundary he could for the sake of cinema and good additions to his acting resume.

3. Bully | dir. by Larry Clark | release date: July 14, 2001

    When I first saw Bully I sort of skimmed through it and never once looked at it again for almost a decade. My only interest at the time were not the actors, but the fact that Larry Clark had directed it and the only reason I cared about that is because at the time I was just becoming a fan of every single Harmony Korine movie ever made and he had ties to Larry Clark through the cult classic 1995 film 'Kids'; Korine only wrote the script for the film Kids and had a cameo. Then, almost a decade later when I went on a roll watching (a selected sum of) Michael Pitt's early film roles, I re-watched it without any skips, pauses, or rewinds and decided that it has to be one of my favorite movies; has to at least be in the top twenty five for me (and that's my own personal ranking, you do what you want in life).

Daniel Franzese and Brad Renfro in Bully, via Tunefind

    Based on a true story, Bully is about a group of people in their late teens and early twenties who plot and then eventually commit a murder on a 'friend' of Marty Puccio's (Brad Renfro) named Bobby Kent, who was played by another pretty talented actor Nick Stahl. Bobby Kent, according to everyone in the group especially at the time, was controlling, violent, and rude, and deemed a Bully by nearly everyone who comes across him. I really like Pitt's portrayal of Donny Semenec, who gets roped into the murder while barely knowing these people and actually commits the first stab to Bobby Kent's shoulder on the night he was murdered. This is an NC-17 film, or at least the copy I have in my possession is NC-17, which baffles me at the thought of a nineteen year old Michael Pitt crushing such an intense and violent role. And that is something we'll see often in his early film career as he often went for more independent type lead roles that we're usually intense and incredibly artistic.

4. Murder By Numbers | dir. by Barbet Schroeder | release date: April 19, 2002

    This movie was Pitt's first starring role in a really big budgeted major motion picture. Starring alongside Ryan Gosling and Sandra Bullock, Pitt delivers a rather well performed and somewhat a tad more emotional role as Justin Pendleton, Gosling's sidekick in the film. In the movie, Gosling and Pitt are two high school seniors who plan the 'perfect crime' and low and behold, actually go out and commit the crime. They strangle a random woman (well mostly Ryan Gosling's character does), and are currently being tracked through various clues by detective Mayweather, played by Bullock. Although this was a big film with some big names, it only earned back fifty six million dollars in theaters against a fifty million dollar budget and was shredded by critics as a terrible film. Well, fifty six million sounds pretty good to me and screw critics, make what you want of it!

5. The Dreamers | dir. by Bernardo Bertolucci | release date: October 11, 2003 (in Italy)

Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel in The Dreamers, via iMDB

    This is actually another pretty major one for Pitt honestly. Bernardo Bertolucci is quite literally a cinema legend. Period. Directing and writing some of the most iconic films released through out the late 1900's including The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and The Emperor, Bertolucci brings us an absolutely astonishing historical drama set in Paris, France in 1968 during the Paris student riots. Michael Pitt plays Matthew, an American student studying France who befriends and eventually lives with brother and sister Theo and Isabelle. Another NC-17 film, Pitt, Green, and Garrel all share full frontal nude scenes together... many times... yes, incredibly strange as Green, and Garrel's characters are blood born brother and sister but wait until you see the movie and see how much further their characters actually go. Yep, that's right.

    Mighty damn fine list and satisfactory writing if I must say so myself. Do you like Michael Pitt movies? Tweet me a picture of a latin A so I know you do, and Tweet me a picture of a horse smiling if you like his movies. 

- Rhett Rhodes