Is Pitt Up For 'Pinkville'?

By Katey Rich

Michael Pitt has spent the bulk of his young career playing perverts, weirdos or other members of the cultural fringe. He probably won't do much to change his reputation if he takes the role he's eyeing in Oliver Stone's Pinkville, about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Pitt would play Lt. William Calley, the Army officer who ordered his platoon to kill everyone in the My Lai village, including women and children, when the American soldiers invaded to seek out the Viet Cong that had found refuge there. Five hundred villagers, most of them civilians, were killed.

Stone's film intends to focus on the investigation of the massacre, and presumably will include the public outcry that followed. Bruce Willis will play William Peers, the man in charge of the investigation, with Woody Harrleson as the Colonel who ordered the invasion of My Lai and Channing Tatum as a helicopter pilot who arrived during the massacre and helped to end it. Michael Pea will play Capt. Ernest Medina, who may or may not have ordered that civilians be killed. As the only soldier convicted of the crime, though, Calley will likely come to the fore as the major villain.

Is baby-faced Pitt up to the part? There's no question he can handle creepy, from the Machiavellian Tommy Gnosis in Hedwig and the Angry Inch to the shifty-eyed revolutionary in The Dreamers. He's respected in some circles for his willingness to branch out, but never lauded for particular acting strength (our Daniel Eagan called him "pallid and emotionless" in this summer's art-house bomb Silk). But think about what we've learned about soldiers, especially in these last years, about how ordinary boys can be transformed so easily into killers, and often it's the baby faces and mild demeanors that hide the largest potential for evil. Something about what lurks beneath Pitt's surface seems to speak to that, and Stone seems well-equipped to tap into it.

We'll see when Pinkville comes out if its examination of American wartime atrocities can provoke discussion of the Iraq war that Redacted seems unlikely to create. Stone can be about as divisive as De Palma, but given his previously demonstrated skill at unveiling our past, I'm betting he'll get Pinkville the attention it will hopefully deserve.