Angelina Jolie recently said that By The Sea (Universal, 11.15) is the “first film completely based on my own crazy mind.” She said in the same article that the drama, set in the ’70s, is “not autobiographical” — i.e., not based on anything she and husband Brad Pitt have gone through. But it does seem to have been “drawn loosely” from a marital trauma suffered by Jolie’s late mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died in January 2007 from ovarian cancer. It happened when husband Jon Voight catted around in 1976, when Angelina was barely a year old. Andrew Morton’s unauthorized biography of Jolie reports that Voight had an affair with actress Stacey Pickren, who played Ophelia to his Hamlet during a production of Shakespeare’s classic at the University of California in Northridge, where Voight was an artist-in-residence. Bertrand filed for divorce in 1978; it was finalized in ’80. My understanding of By The Sea‘s basic plot is that the marriage between Brad and Angie’s couple is coming apart due an incident of infidelity on Brad’s part. So basically Brad is more or less playing Jon Voight and Angie is more or less playing her mom. Not precisely but close enough.  It all fits together.  [Tip of the hat to Sasha Stone, who shared this view a couple of hours ago.]

Speaking to Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller about By The Sea, Jolie said that “I know some people are going to hate it [and] some are going to like it. But it was important to me to feel like an artist again.”