She certainly had us fooled. But maybe what Jolie is really saying is that she prefers to be in charge. No wonder that, for all her talk of the importance of equal partnerships, Jolie always feels like the white-hot center of her universe, with Pitt playing the dutiful sidekick. Even when Pitt is off working on his own projects—movies that always seem to require bizarre choices in facial hair—it’s difficult not to imagine him as anything but a cork tossed on Jolie’s stormy sea. In every paparazzi shot, Pitt looks like just another handler among many, protecting the queen and her enormous brood: Angie royalty, Brad her loyal footservant. Is this interpretation just an outcropping of our anxiety about shifting gender roles? Or is it simply that, having witnessed Jolie’s intelligence and self-possession and Pitt’s strange clumsiness over the years, it’s hard not to feel that she should lead and he should follow? Are we unnecessarily demeaning a nice guy who has embraced an egalitarian marriage to a strong woman, or are we just trying to elevate Jolie to the status of a modern-day Mother of Dragons?

For a Mother of Dragons, what is most striking about Jolie’s apparent desires is how earnest they are at their core: professional success yielding creative autonomy; a marriage that is both hopelessly photogenic and a fulfilling partnership; an obvious ability to relish the joys of motherhood with or without cameras present; simple philanthropic goodness on a scale that matters globally. Could anyone argue with these ambitions? And yet they’re embroidered with just enough stubborn hints that she’s somehow reinventing the wheel that we tend to encounter them as considerably more radical, if not as expressions of outright hostility. This goes especially for her marriage. Pitt has said that, in support of gay marriage, he and Jolie wouldn’t marry until “everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able.” Then they went ahead and did it anyway. And Jolie hinted to German magazine Das Neue Blatt that the two have an open marriage. “I doubt that fidelity is absolutely essential for a relationship,” she said. “Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means to be chained together. We make sure that we never restrict each other.” This is a pair who chose to spend their honeymoon shooting a movie (or “an art film,” as Jolie calls it) about a deeply unhappy married couple. Filming involved accessing their aggression toward each other, but as Jolie told Vogue, “As artists we wanted something that took us out of our comfort zones.” She added, “It’s not the safest idea. But life is short.” All of that photogenic suffering was worth it, though: “We’re proud of ourselves for being brave enough to try it,” Jolie explained to Vanity Fair.

If equating a pricey film shoot with a struggle to be brave sounds a little rich, that may just be the dissonance inherent in having all the time and money in the world and still working very hard to pursue the exact life you want. That very audacity has placed Jolie pretty far ahead of her times over the years. She was the Zorro of Other Women in the hopelessly heteronormative aughts, then she acquired Benetton-ready babies at the dawn of our transition to a truly global culture. Her New York Times op-ed about her elective surgery this spring pointed the way to a brand-new era of transparency and self-empowered, selfie activism. And if Jolie’s real has never been discernible from her fake, that only meant she was a beacon to the unholy mob of Taylor Swifts to follow. For better or for worse, Jolie is a woman who stands up for what she believes, conjures a tempest, then remarks serenely at how lovely the weather has been lately. And if most of her choices happen to entail jaw-dropping costs, outsize proportions, and self-mythologizing acts of filmmaking, well … life is short, isn’t it?