One of the world’s most famous actresses came to Washington last week to promote her latest movie. But in more than half an hour of conversation, Angelina Jolie didn’t once touch on any tabloid topics. One word repeatedly came up: “intervention.”
The actress wasn’t talking about getting a troubled colleague into rehab. She meant it in the political sense, and she repeated it because she believes the United States, and the international community, should be intervening sooner — and more often — in ugly conflicts around the world.
I won’t deny it: It felt surreal to be having a political discussion with the woman People magazine named the world’s most beautiful in 2006. It was also surprising. As a film critic and writer in the capital of the free world for years, I’ve heard countless celebrities make political pronouncements. Almost none of them sounded as thoughtful — and as nuanced — as Jolie.
One expects to meet the 36-year-old Jolie and find she’s as elegantly attractive in person as she is on screen. One doesn’t expect to discover she seems more keenly intelligent than most professional pundits.
Jolie came to the District to talk about her latest film, in which she actually doesn’t appear. “In the Land of Blood and Honey” is her debut as a writer-director. And an unlikely debut it is: The film is almost entirely in the Serbo-Croatian language. It tells the tale of two citizens of Sarajevo during the bloody Bosnian war of the 1990s: a Serb army officer and a Muslim painter, who dated before the war and find themselves on the opposite sides of a prison camp after it begins.
“Blood and Honey” is, more than anything else, a war film, though unlike most in the genre, it focuses on what happens outside the combat zone. It’s a particular story of two (imagined) people, but Jolie is quick to admit she made it with a larger point in mind.
“What a horrible thing we did internationally not to help these people in a timely fashion,” she says. “All the issues in this film are going on right now in many other places in the world.”
With that move — from the world and time of her film, to the present day — Jolie makes a definite statement in the part of the political arena in which she’s most interested: foreign policy.
Jolie became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007 and a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2001.
“We need to be doing more,” she flatly declares of American work in the region.
She went to Syria in 2009 to meet Iraqi refugees, along with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma. Two years later, she traveled to Turkey, to talk to refugees there from the violence in Syria, where Assad’s response to protests has been murderous. She plans to meet with many more.
I ask about regime change in Syria; Angelina Jolie warns that we don’t want the Arab nation to become a satellite of its Persian neighbor, Iran.
This is unlike any celebrity interview, ever. Those who worked with her on “Blood and Honey” were just as surprised.
“The first time we met, she knew more about the history of my country than I did,” reports star Zana Marjanovic. “It’s so important, because art is a serious thing.”
“Blood and Honey” won’t do as big business as films starring Jolie end to do. But that won’t stop her from making more movies that, in some way, make political arguments. She says she’s already written her next project — on Afghanistan.
Kelly Jane Torrance is the Washington Examiner movie critic. Her reviews appear weekly and she can be reached at [email protected].
