I’m sure most of you have heard of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which opened at Cannes to extreme mixed reactions, even some boos, but on the whole, critics have been raving about it. Just read some reviews by some prominent critics: “sublime,” “poetic,” “extraordinary,” are just some of the adjectives that’ve been thrown around. Anyway, it went on to win Canne’s Palme d’Or.
I went out the other night with a friend to our local Laemmle Theatre to watch it, and wow. There’s a lot to talk about here. I’ll try not to lose myself in this. And forgive me if it starts to fall apart a little towards the end.
Malick’s undertaking is ambitious; he is working on themes of metaphysical levels and challenges the audience from beginning to end with very loose narrative structure, unconventional cinematography, and a combination of editing and imagery verging on the surreal. The film revolves around these central elements:
- An man, Jack O’Brien (played by Sean Penn), seemingly adrift in life, coming to terms with his relationship with his family, especially with his father (Brad Pitt), and the death of his brother.
- The profoundness of existence in each moment human life, as told through flashbacks Jack of growing up with his brothers and Catholic, Texan family in the 1950s.
- Strange, organic landscapes seeming to represent Jack’s memory or psyche. (Symbolic travel to a state of contentment/peace with his past?)
- All juxtaposed with open-ended montages depicting the endless epic march of Universe and Time.
Yeah. Heavy.
Malick has always been invested in using narratives revolving around strife and nature as a backdrop to explore existential internal spaces, notably in the form of voiceover. For example, in Thin Red Line, he uses both the ruckus and the calm in a WWII battle to constantly invite the audience into the heads of various characters as they ruminate on their perilous existence, and of keeping their humanity in the face of horror. These voiceovers are always in the form of eloquent, soliloquy-like verse, far removed from the normal speech and dialect of the characters, suggesting that we aren’t hearing just their brain thinking, but rather something coming from deeper within (or beyond?) their psyche. Here’s a good quote illustrating his style of filmmaking (you can tell he’s a fan):
Those rambling philosophical voiceovers; the placid images of nature, offering quiet contrast to the evil deeds of men; the stunning cinematography, often achieved with natural light; the striking use of music—here is a filmmaker with a clear sensibility and aesthetic who makes narrative films that are neither literary nor theatrical, in the sense of foregrounding dialogue, event, or character, but are instead principally cinematic, movies that suggest narrative, emotion, and idea through image and sound.1
Malick’s auteurship is palpable. He goes far beyond his explorations in the past; disregarding narrative convention and delving deep into the tiniest, intimate, and internal moments while meditating on epic, rolling, unstoppable spaces of both the microscopic and cosmic; realms he describes using pure emotion, color, shape, and sond. The loves, tragedies, everyday mundane trials of the O’Brien family and Jack’s childhood are treated with the same epic wondrous, but fleeting, tone, swept up with soaring chords of classical music and absolutely beautiful, constantly energetic cinematography.
This is paired, accompanied by majestic classical music, with mysterious images of nebulous shapes, movements and patterns connoting microscopic activity, leading to imagery of actual nebulas, planets, and planetary systems. The unstoppable, glacial movements of Time, Matter, and the Universe. The abstracted use of shape and color in these montages reminded me of the experimental filmmaking of Stan Brackage at times. By pairing the two together, and treating them with the same awe and grandiose reverence, Malick turns the fleeting experiences of this family into miracles of existence that are a microcosm of the cosmical monumentality that is the formation and evolution of the Universe (and perhaps the Divine).
Whoa.
If it helps, I am reminded of the scene at the end of Chapter VII in the graphic novel great, Watchmen, when Dr. Manhattan realizes the value of humanity and human life as Laurie comes to terms with her new-found knowledge of her biological origins:
“… they pulled a gag on me is what they did!
My whole life’s a joke. One, big, stupid, meaningless… aw shit…”
“I don’t think your life’s meaningless.”
“… uh…
You don’t? [… ] But… why?”
“Thermo-dynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter … until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.
To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air into gold… that is the crowning of unlikelyhood.
The thermo-dynamic miracle.”
“But… if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle… I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world.”
“Yes.
Anybody in the world.
… But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget…
I forget.
We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Come… dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things must leave their fingerprints most clearly.”2
This is what Malick wants the audience to see. The miracle of life that encapsulates all of the energy, matter, time that somehow came together to make our singular experiences. Yet, these singular experiences spring from the same source. If a lot of this sounds kinda like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’re not alone. Both films deal with similar metaphysical/existential themes of comparing human experience with the eternity of the cosmos, using open-ended surreal imagery and soaring classical music. In fact, I was constantly reminded of Space Odyssey throughout. Here’s Roger Ebert gushing over Tree of Life, and another quote regarding the use of music in Kubrick’s Odyssey:
The Tree of Life is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I’ve seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and it lacked Malick’s fierce evocation of human feeling. 3
I guess you can say there’s a little more Humanism in Malick’s existentialism than Kubrick’s.
[The rejected] score, […] [was] a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for 2001 because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action — to give us emotional cues. The classical music chosen by Kubrick exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals.4
All in all, the film was an overwhelming experience, I and respect Malick for undertaking this project of outstanding proportions.
What made my movie watching partner and I incredulous, though, was the direction of the montages showing the cosmos. What you eventually realize is what you’re seeing is a depiction of the Big Bang. That is all well and fine, but my eyebrow was raising further and further as we see young Earth developing continents, life and organisms begin to develop, and then…
DINOSAURS.
Yes, dinosaurs. Emotive, pensive ones at that. You can see how thoughtful CGIed dinosaurs appearing in the middle of this film might have thrown me out of the movie a bit. I can see that he was trying to treat them in the most unsilliest way possible, but I laughed. My friend laughed. Also, something about realizing that I was watching the development of life on Earth made it… I don’t know… preachy and heavy handed. I enjoy trying to figure out what the director is doing during the film, rather than being told. With the tone of awe and mystery surrounding the whole film, ambiguous imagery less specific to Earth seems more appropriate. The Earth is too familiar to us, and it felt like I was watching Planet Earth or something from a high school science class during some points.
Oh, and speaking of heavy handed. Dude was HEAVY HANDED. Understand that with an auteur dealing with material this extreme, you have to be a little bit. Some symbolism was just too blunt. Too obvious really cramps your poetic style.
Also, something I hadn’t even thought about during the movie but was pointed out to me afterwards by my friend, who said that as a woman, it was hard for her to identify with the three brothers growing up. I guess with such a lack of narrative, the motives behind some actions were lost on her. A kid with anger problems is what she saw.
Ok. Thats it. You should watch it. You may or may not enjoy it, but you’ll be left with a memorable and thought provoking piece. If anything, watching that film effected me so much, it drove me to write this. Look, I even made a bibliography.
- James
PS: Be on the look out for more reviews like this.
(Image from Wikipedia)
1. A Stitch in Time: Chris Wisniewski on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The New World at Reverse Shot
2. [Moore, Alan. (w), Dave Gibbons (p), and John Higgins (i).] “Chapter VII: Old Ghosts.” Watchmen. NY: DC Comics, 1987: 26-28.
3. “The Tree of Life”. Chicago Sun Times (Chicago). June 2, 2011.
Roger Ebert. “2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)”. Chicago Sun-Times.
I went and saw Gus Van Sant’s newest, Restless, on Saturday. I’m not hugely knowledgeable on his body of work, but I remember Van Sant from his success in both indie/arthouse and mainstream venues (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, Milk); so after a good burger and a couple of beers from down the street, I walked into the theatre with a belly full of high hopes.
