Brad Pitt, money maker, has bone to pick with American capitalism

Brad Pitt has brought his new movie “Killing Them Softly” to the Cannes Film Festival, and as The Times reported Tuesday morning, he and the film’s director had an anti-capitalist message (or, at least, a message aimed against capitalism as recently practiced in the U.S.) to go along with it.

And that message is coming from the mouth of the man who is the new face of Chanel No. 5 -- a job for which Pitt reportedly will receive seven figures.

The new movie’s “touchstone piece of dialogue,” as The Times put it, is “America isn’t a country -- it’s a business.” And Pitt has done very well in that business.

It seems uniquely American for a celebrity to make money hand over fist, thanks to Hollywood ... and then become the highly paid face of a Parisian perfume maker, to boot.

A Pitt representative didn’t respond right away to an email request for comment, but the actor said at Tuesday’s news conference that at the time he decided to get behind the film, it was the “apex of the home mortgage debacle and people were losing homes right and left.”

As you watch the film, he said, it seems like a gangster movie, but at the end, it coalesces, “saying something about the larger world.”

It likely doesn’t say that Hollywood celebrities should turn down money.

True, with Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s history of philanthropy, it could be that a good chunk of his incoming take-home pay from this film and from Chanel will not be taken home at all but will go toward their good works.

The pair have the charitable Jolie-Pitt Foundation, and Pitt has 36 charities and foundations he supports, according to the Look to the Stars celebrity-giving website.

But here’s a vote for Pitt keeping those seven figures from Chanel -- just be a selfish capitalist. That’s one figure for each of his children plus one to grow on.