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On 11/28/11 9:43 PM, A Vasquez wrote:
Have you done an extensive review of this movie? I'd love to read it.
I don't know if I will be able to muster the energy but in the meanwhile
here's something from Armond White, my colleague in NYFCO who I admire
immensely:
http://www.nypress.com/article-22454-unintelligent-design.html
Unintelligent Design
Terrence Malick tries to make up for lost time with a clunky opus, The
Tree of Life
By Armond White
Tuesday, May 24,2011
Give 20th Century Fox credit for releasing Terrence Malick’s The Tree of
Life as a movie and not as a glue-trap for year-end awards. Five films
into Malick’s eccentric 40-year career, it’s understood that he
intentionally brands himself as art-minded. Indifferent to the usual
commercial concerns of mainstream filmmakers, Malick has always
exercised the privileges of erudition, which lend each of his films the
aura of a cultural event. But that doesn’t mean The Tree of Life is a
great movie—despite the pole-vaulting ambitions of its title.
Just when you get accustomed to Malick’s precise hand-held camera
movements and sly jump-cuts that give elegant spontaneity to the
illusion of a family’s idyllic-then-tragic life in a small Texas town,
The Tree of Life shifts style and tense to observe the beginning of the
cosmos, then pre-history, then shifting again to examine the
infinitesimal origins of cells. Those huge leaps are not immediately
coherent, but Malick does them with such domineering confidence that
viewers will accept his grandiose allusions to phases of life and the
construction of time—his belief in his own visual poetry.
Perched on a cliff of near self-parody, The Tree of Life dares to reveal
Malick’s idiosyncratic—and humorless—interest in existential
occurrences. He uses America’s past to showcase mankind, nature and
time. The Texas O’Brien family (Father Brad Pitt, Mother Jessica
Chastain and three boys well-cast for remarkable genetic similarity as
their sons) supplies a story context for Malick’s personal speculation
on spiritual themes. His previous movies grew from the germ of mid-20th
century pop ideas: juvenile delinquency (Badlands), the industrial
revolution (Days of Heaven), war (The Thin Red Line) and colonialism
(The New World). Being of the movie-brat generation, Malick related
those subjects to familiar genres and iconography that he expanded into
what critic and Malick-scholar Gregory Solman accurately termed
phenomenological epics.
As an artiste, Malick collates spiritual signs, questing for meaning; an
ambition that achieved its fullest expression in the historical,
political, sexual, racial paradoxes of The New World. But The Tree of
Life is little more than a grab-bag of generational preoccupations:
outerspace explorations and inner space doubt. Starting with a
scriptural quotation from the Book of Job, Malick depicts a nuclear
family’s disillusionment still evident in son Jack O’Brien’s adulthood
(played by Sean Penn), whose modern anomie is depicted in familiar cold,
gleaming industrial settings that contrast warm, lyrical boyhood
memories of his father’s frustrations as businessman, artist and parent.
Malick digresses with etudes on Intelligent Design, where CGI scenes of
prehistoric animals, mitochondria and phallic fish are meant to reflect
later aggression in human behavior. But these aquarium/observatory
tropes get mixed-up with Malick’s own quasi-profound (quasi-religious)
reaching: dividing Father and Mother as Nature vs. Grace in voiceover
counterpoint. The son’s eventual questioning of authority (“Why should I
be good if you aren’t?”) is either blasphemy or just the ultimate 1970s
youth-rebellion—with no small amount of New Age sentimentality.
Koyaanisqatsi, anyone?
“Tell us a story from before we can remember”—one of O’Brien sons
requests of his mother—typifies Malick’s storytelling impulse. Always
undeniably romantic and nostalgic, he will transcend nostalgia through
specific adolescent fetishes: key instances of private pleasure, lonely
perceptions, secrets. These are often pop myths (like the dinosaurs and
planets), but they can also be psychic myths, as when Young Jack (played
by Hunter McCracken) spies on arguing couples or sneaks a woman’s
lingerie, leading to a signature Malick surmise, “What have I done? What
have I started?” and equating sex, guilt and sin. Malick falls back on
these surmises as a reflex: montages on sibling rivalry, filial
resentment and a clever, expansive sequence where the O’Brien boys
imitating a street drunk becomes a confrontation with the infirm, then
with criminal-class unfortunates. Frankly, these meanderings cause
Jack’s symbolism to go berserk—from Job to Judas to Cain to Abel.
Malick’s poetry loses sociological and political grounding. That’s what
distinguished David Gordon Green’s George Washington; Green had the
timely good fortune (and Charles Burnett influence) to add substance to
Malick’s method of reveries.
Pauline Kael memorably derided Days of Heaven as “a Christmas tree; you
can hang all your old metaphors on it.” The Tree of Life is overloaded
with pensées—Malick’s visual metaphors—but the grand ideas bloat its
human drama, making it banal, as when alienated Jack wanders among ferns
outside impersonal office towers. It’s less effective than Alain Resnais
finding weeds sprouting between the concrete of city streets in Wild
Grass, a whimsical, instantaneous image revealing nature, progress and
idiosyncrasy. Everything Malick attempts in The Tree of Life was already
achieved in Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments, a memoir that used a
wife’s photographic talent to probe human relations and social progress.
And Robert Altman already perfectly revised American family heritage in
the vivid, expansive memory sequence of his Sam Shepard adaptation, Fool
for Love. Those films achieved cinematic poetry naturally by focusing
imagination, history and destiny.
In The Tree of Life, Malick prioritizes self-conscious artistry over any
coherent concept of family, society or the origins of life.
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s clean light is pretty but
inexpressive; it plays into Malick’s vain idea of cinema as a kinetic
picture-puzzle. Yes, some of these images refer to D.W. Griffith’s
strong and fluid visions of man-in-nature and Jean-Luc Godard’s ironic
view of society’s spiritual decline in the midst of divinity in Nouvelle
Vague, but much of The Tree of Life is not transcendent; it looks like
greeting card homilies. There’s not enough specificity to all this
self-conscious “beauty.” For example, Chastain’s performance is mostly
exquisite mime since Malick neglects to articulate Mother’s
consciousness, spending more time with Young Jack’s rebellion and
McCracken’s menacing glower. But this could also be due to Malick’s
great leap backwards—undisciplined poetic storytelling that leaves out
connections between primordial instinct and the modern cultural habits
and biological drives that exist eons later. It’s as if Malick was
making up for time lost to his ’70s peers and sought to combine the
stoner astonishment of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the inherited family
depression of Death of a Salesman.
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