The Essentials: Angelina Jolie’s 5 Best Performances

“Girl, Interrupted” (1999)
It’s almost hard to recall these days, when the Angelina we know directs films about war, writes movingly about women’s issues and adopts whole nations (all while resembling a human Jessica Rabbit), that she once pretty much redefined the offscreen role of “substance-abusing, wild-child Hollywood kid.” But in the late ’90s, she was squarely in that zone, approaching the end of her first marriage, occasionally institutionalized and openly bisexual. Riffing on that edgy image of danger and damage in precursor films like ”Hell’s Kitchen” and “Foxfire,” Jolie got her first proper break with this James Mangold adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s bestselling memoir of her time in a mental institution for young women in the late 1960s. Jolie plays Lisa Rowe, a manipulative sociopath with whom Susanna (Winona Ryder) first is fascinated by and then befriends, with the hint, via a particular kiss, at more than that. It’s a showy role, and duly brought Jolie a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but to be fair, her performance is more restrained than it could have been—she seems to understand the nature of her charisma means she doesn’t have to do much more than look sultry or scowl through dirty hair at a particular moment to sell her character as the magnetic center of this motley gang. We’re not massive fans of the film, and if we’re being honest, that year we’d probably have given the award to fellow nominee Samantha Morton (for the underrated  “Sweet and Lowdown”) but Jolie does deserve props for investing Lisa with soul when she could have been all attitude. And whatever emotional effect the climax has on the audience, as Lisa’s front breaks down completely, is due to her commitment and belief in the role. If anything, Jolie’s performance is undersold by the twists the film takes later on, like the whole running-away-together sequence, which are added for melodramatic effect and don’t appear in the source memoir.

“Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (2005)
For all of her fine dramatic chops, Jolie’s one of the rare female A-listers who’s as much action heroine as tear-jerker: it’s hard to imagine, say, Amy Adams or Nicole Kidman kicking ass and taking names in the same way as Jolie has in her biggest hits (though a new generation of actors, like Jennifer Lawrence and Emily Blunt, are bridging the gap better). We wouldn’t necessarily argue that she’s doing her best work in “Gone In 60 Seconds,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” “Wanted” or even “Salt,” but she gets to have the most fun, and play one of her most iconic roles, in Doug Liman‘s actioner “Mr. And Mrs. Smith.” Still Jolie’s biggest live-action hit, though probably still best known as the film that first paired her with future beau Brad Pitt, it sees the two megastars play a married couple who, unknown to each other, are badass assassins working for competing private intelligence firms. Their marriage is crumbling, and, after they discover each other’s secrets, they’re asked to kill each other, but after a barnstorming fight sequence, reunite and turn on their employers. Even more so than most of Doug Liman’s movies, the finished product is a mess, clearly assembled out of multiple rewrites and reshoots, and only vaguely coherent, both tonally and in terms of the actual plot. And the action, while well-shot, sometimes feels like it’s coming across as a sort of apology/celebration of domestic violence, leaving a very sour note to proceedings. But it’s the chance to see two movie stars do what they do is best, and Jolie in particular is terrific: physically impressive, sexy while somehow pulling off the more domestic elements of her character, and with a sly sense of humor at play throughout. Even in her action films, she’s often playing a rather dour sort, but if nothing else, the film serves as a reminder that someone should let her let her hair down and have some fun more often.