Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in “By the Sea.” Photograph by Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett

What goes on between actors in their private lives is really none of our business, but the movies that they make are our business and our pleasure, which is why my first thought upon hearing that Angelina Jolie had filed for divorce from Brad Pitt was, I guess there won’t be a sequel to “By the Sea.” In that movie, Jolie played Vanessa Bertrand, a former dancer, and Pitt was Roland Bertrand, a blocked writer, and they brought something more than chemistry to their performances—they displayed sufficient mutual confidence to give free rein to the couple’s pent-up hatred. It’s not that I think Jolie incapable of directing another film in the absence of Pitt (for that matter, maybe the divorce won’t prevent them from working together) but that movie conjured an air of the intimate projections of a power couple, which proved particularly artistically productive.

If, in the future, they were able to work through their discord onscreen, the artistic results could be a directorial detonation of the power of Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.” Uncouples are as good a cinematic subject as couples, and if “An Unmarried Woman”—a great movie that Paul Mazursky made on the basis of what he learned about the lives of others—needed an update, I’d bet that Jolie, refracting or responding to experience, could do a superb job of it. What’s more, for every uncoupling there can be another coupling. And where there are artists there’s art. So, when it comes to whether Jolie can direct another film in the personal vein of “By the Sea,” I’m not worried.

On the other hand, gossipologists have been reporting for several months that Jolie’s interests may have veered away from movies altogether—that she’s contemplating a political career and that this prospect has been a source of tension in her marriage to Pitt. The New York Post, in a report on the breakup, cites an unnamed source on this subject: “The older she gets, the more serious she becomes, and she is sick of the Hollywood thing . . . He wants to make movies. She doesn’t. It’s a fundamental difference. It’s how you live your life.” I don’t doubt Jolie’s good intentions or her abilities, even if the reviews are mixed regarding the public good of actors’ political careers.

Yet what do we gawkers ever really know about what goes on in a couple’s relationship, whether it’s between celebrities or not? At the very least, most general readers know more than readers used to know, because the Hollywood publicity machine no longer controls the press—and producers no longer control artists’ lives—as firmly as it did in the high-studio era. Although one never really knows about an actor, one still knows a lot, even too much—and this plethora of knowledge has had a peculiar effect on the reception, and the conception, of movies.

When movie stars were remote figures, demigods whose public images and biographies were crafted with sculptural care and scriptural authority, they were also idols for purchase and consumption, who could as easily be smashed in rage as exalted. That is what happened to Ingrid Bergman when she left her husband for Roberto Rossellini and got pregnant with their child before marrying him. She became an instant pariah, denounced on the floor of Congress and subjected to boycotts. (The films that they made together, however, are among the best—and most influential—ones ever made.) Publicists and studios exerted rigid control over stars’ lives, and tried to control reporting about them, because general social standards of behavior were, at least in the public realm, stringently moralistic and harshly judgmental.

The situation has, happily, been stood on its head. In recent decades, with the end of collusion between press and publicists to conceal information, and, with the end of ostracism over personal conduct (except when it’s a matter of severe misdeeds involving victims or remarks that are offensive), celebrities’ domestic lives generally have little effect on public reception of their work. Nonetheless, their private lives, subjected to relentless exposure, may well be a tougher role to sustain than any that they play onscreen. It’s a miracle that, in the constant eye of reporters and paparazzi, anyone can maintain any kind of ordinary relationship at all. Precisely because actors are now known, more than ever, to be like their viewers—because they are, in effect, humanized, brought down from the pedestal, extracted from the marble, and rendered in flesh and blood—they’re also respected (as distinct from adored) as never before.

This is all to the good. Critics in earlier eras uninhibitedly insulted the appearance and the personality of actors as if they were writing about the taste of breakfast cereals or the design of cars. Now it’s generally recognized that the product of actors is a performance, and critics’ attention to their performances, not to their physiques, is an exemplary form of progress. Simultaneously, the acknowledgment of the humanity of actors—of the sheer fact of actors’ physical presence, of the physical and emotional risks inherent in being depicted onscreen, and, for that matter, of the never-ending high-wire act of living in the spotlight of gossip—has led to a peculiar reversal in critical trends. This is a moment of the ascendance of acteurism in lieu of auteurism, of critical efforts to read movies in terms of the authority of performance rather than to see performance as an effect of direction.

Here, criticism circles around to join popular culture and democratic viewing—where the celebrities rule and where the actors, not the directors, are the selling point of movies. Acteurism is the poptimism of film criticism, the convergence of critical acumen with the vox populi. The divergence occurs in practice—as when Jolie, like many other actors, decides to direct. (How many directors, by contrast, clamor to act?) There’s a difference in kind between the director’s and the actor’s artistic scope and power. Pitt has honorably and fervently committed his formidable artistry to formidable artists, such as Terrence Malick, David Fincher, Steve McQueen, the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh—and, of course, Jolie herself. Couples separate all the time, among luminaries and the obscure alike; but for an artist to tire of her art just as it’s taking flight—that would be a public tragedy.