Inglourious baristas: why is Brad Pitt making coffee for 16 abusive dogs?

Brad Pitt has a new movie out this month, The Heart of the Beast, about an emotionally damaged man who forms a life-saving bond with a dog. If that sounds familiar, maybe it is because you have seen The Call of the Wild. Or maybe it is because you have seen A Dog’s Way Home. Or maybe it is because you have seen Dog. Or, look, you get the idea.

But perhaps Brad Pitt knows that getting people to see something as unimaginative as The Heart of the Beast is an uphill struggle, because that would explain why he has just made an advert that looks and feels much more like the Brad Pitt dog movie that deserves to be made. In short, it is an advert where Brad Pitt gets loudly disparaged by a number of dogs for an extended period of time.

As reported by Variety, the commercial is for the De’Longhi Magnifica Duo, an all-singing, all-dancing coffee machine that retails in the UK for about £700. But really the product is beside the point. The main point is that the advert, running to almost two minutes, sees Brad Pitt stumble around cluelessly while a small army of real dogs – all of whom have names, some of whom are dressed in human clothes – shout insults at him.

As he wanders into his living room, some of the dogs (in subtitle) tell him that he woke up too late. They tell him to make a hot coffee and, even though he has started to make a cold one, he drops his head and sullenly obliges. Then another dog says that he can’t have any coffee at all until his attitude improves. “OK,” he mumbles in return, like a put-upon sitcom dad. The dogs berate him for his slovenliness and his stupidity and, when he finally snaps and tells them to go and fetch a stick, they make him fetch a stick for them instead.

It’s a weird advert. It is slightly reminiscent of that bizarre Chinese commercial for Chinese vitamins from a few years back, when Tom Hiddleston cooks you breakfast before looking straight into your eyes and promising that he’s going to have sex with you. The difference is that, while you could tell that Hiddleston desperately hoped that nobody would see his ad, Pitt’s has been made for an American market. He wants you to see this.

Photograph: De'Longhi

Of course, it helps that the weirdness is deliberate. The commercial was directed by Spike Jonze, the visionary director of no films at all for the last 13 years. The world has been crying out for a new film by Jonze, and if the closest we’re going to get is a film where Brad Pitt gets insulted by a dog named Kyle, then that will have to do.

In fact, the more you consider it, the better a move this advert seems for Pitt. Compared with the derivative grit-jawed Americana of The Heart of the Beast, it demonstrates that he’s much better when he’s allowed to be funny. And if it underlines a connection between Pitt and dogs along the way, creating an implied synergy with his movie, then that’s OK too.

It’s also a big step up from Pitt’s previous De’Longhi commercials, the majority of which just required him to stand still and smoulder for a while. Those commercials could have starred anyone. You could have put a carrot on human growth hormones and it would have adequately done the job. At least this one has a bit of personality.

But perhaps it also serves a greater purpose. After all, Brad Pitt is a man with something of a reputation problem, thanks to his messy split with Angelina Jolie and her allegations of intoxication and violent behaviour. It’s a similar (although less dramatic) predicament to the one that Johnny Depp finds himself in. But while Depp decided to announce his comeback by playing literature’s biggest arsehole Ebenezer Scrooge, Pitt has instead chosen to surround himself with loads of cute dogs. What’s more, he’s being subservient to them. Look at him! How could you possibly stay mad at him?

Only the De’Longhi sales team will know if this has been a successful gambit or not, but speaking personally I think it works perfectly. With any luck it will bring Spike Jonze out of retirement, and Brad Pitt Gets Shit-Talked by Some Dogs will be a motion picture by next Christmas.