Angelina Jolie's 'Couture' Reached US Theaters Today. The Performance Is Better Than the Movie Around It.

Couture has been on the road since last September. It premiered at Toronto, played San Sebastian and Rome, opened the QCinema festival in Manila, and went wide in France back in February. Today it finally reached American screens, a limited release from Vertical, which picked up the North American rights in March.

That is a long tour for a movie whose strongest card has been face up since the first festival screening. Angelina Jolie is very good in it. The harder question, the one critics kept circling from Toronto onward, is whether the film around her is any good. The answer that has settled into a consensus is: not really.

What it is

Alice Winocour wrote and directed Couture, and she shot a chunk of it somewhere no fiction filmmaker had been allowed before. Chanel let her inside its Paris showroom and atelier, with real access to the fittings, the seamstresses, the backstage scramble of a runway show. Winocour has said she wanted the fashion world from the workers' side instead of the usual reverence for the male designer at the top.

The story threads three women through one Paris Fashion Week. Jolie plays Maxine Walker, an American filmmaker in town for a shoot who learns she has breast cancer while she is there. Ella Rumpf is Angele, a makeup artist. Anyier Anei is Ada, a model newly arrived from South Sudan. The diagnosis is not set dressing. Winocour built that strand partly out of Jolie's own health history, and Variety reported the project drew directly on it. That is where all the "most personal role" talk comes from, and for once the phrase is doing real work.

Where critics land

On Jolie, they do not argue. On the movie, they split, and the split is lopsided.

Deadline's Pete Hammond was the warmest, calling it maybe her most personal role yet and "an engrossing study of the humanity and vulnerability of those the rest of us just might see doing their job." The Hollywood Reporter went cooler, a "wispy" mood piece in which Jolie "explores her vulnerability in a vacuum." AwardsWatch handed it a B minus under a headline saying Jolie is "coming apart at the seams in Alice Winocour's underwhelming fashion house drama." JoBlo put it plainest: she is "great in a film that is not nearly as good as her performance." The Rotten Tomatoes tally sits at 60 percent from 40 reviews, and the site's critics' consensus calls it a skeptical look at high fashion whose insights run shallower than the industry it is poking at.

The BCN read

The shape of that reaction tells you most of what you need before you buy a ticket. When the reviews for a star vehicle line up this neatly, all agreeing that the lead is the reason to show up and the film keeps holding her at arm's length, you are usually looking at a performance hunting for a screenplay that never quite arrives. By the critics' account, the three storylines brush against each other without ever knotting together, and the Chanel access that sounds irresistible in a press note becomes a lot of gorgeous texture with not much pressure under it.

None of that is Jolie's to fix, and by every account she does not try to muscle past the material so much as live inside it. A diagnosis taken without histrionics. The small administrative indignities of being sick in a city that runs on glamour. That is the movie people will tell you to see, and what they are really telling you to see is her.

So that is the recommendation, asterisk attached. If a quiet, somewhat diffuse French drama built around a great actress at her least vain sounds like your evening, Couture will not waste it. If you need the picture to be as sharp as its lead, walk in with your expectations set a notch lower.

BCN Score: 6.5 / 10. A first-rate Jolie performance stitched into a film that never finds the same focus.