Re: [Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious

[Louis Proyect]

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Another great review from another NYFCO colleague.

http://www.observer.com/2011/culture/evolution-real-time-terrence-malicks-ponderous-tree-life-ponders-meaning-existence

Evolution, In Real Time! Terrence Malick’s Ponderous ‘The Tree of Life’ 
Ponders the Meaning of Existence


By Rex Reed 5/24 11:28pm

The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s incomprehensible history of 
evolution from seed to death (and beyond), was booed in Cannes. Now I 
know why. It is 138 minutes of the kind of pretentious twaddle that 
makes critics slobber and audiences snore. Sifting through the reams of 
recyclable blogs and print reviews dispatched from Cannes, where the 
film went on to win a prize, I’m saddened but also relieved to discover 
that all those frenzied fans and detractors have no more idea what this 
metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is about than I do. The more they try to 
explain it, the sillier they get. One over-zealous critic called it “a 
religious experience.” No wonder church attendance is down on Sunday.


I wanted to like this one, but Mr. Malick–who hates the press, never 
gives interviews, and has made only five films in 30 years (all 
flops)–makes it impossible. I can only report what I see. Gorgeous 
camerawork fills the spaces in the first hour with impressionistic 
images, as the director, a devout Christian questioning the mysteries of 
the universe, conducts private talks with God in the form of whispers. 
(“Where were you?” “Answer me.”) Instead of a narrative cinema, we get 
fields of sunflowers. Pastures of grazing cows. Oak limbs filtered by 
sun rays.  Instead of dialogue, we get boiling lava, stars like dust 
mites wafting through midnight darkness, rents in the earth’s surface 
that invite steaming gases, tears and crevices in the skin of a vessel 
called Earth that lead to volcanic explosions.  After an hour of 
disconnected poetic vision, it becomes wincingly clear that Mr. Malick 
has seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey too many times and is 
still trying to figure it out. By the time the movie reached the bloody 
tissues in the arterial walls of sea urchins floating up from the bottom 
of the sea, I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes had passed without 
a sign of Brad Pitt, and I figured it was time for something to happen. 
Through deductive reasoning, I also decided, based on evidence, this was 
not a movie, but a TV special made for the National Geographic channel.


Enter the computer-generated dinosaurs, tramping through the woods and 
stomping each other like figs. Oh, I get it. This is Mr. Malick showing 
us the beginning of time.  Whole centuries are left out (thank God) but 
eventually some people appear, living simply off the land in Waco, 
Texas. (The movie was filmed in Austin, where it is hard to get a good 
T-rex.) Is there a plot? Well, no. I mean, maybe. That is, sort of. A 
man (Brad Pitt) and a woman (Jessica Chastain) bear three sons. Step by 
step, they learn to walk, talk, feel pain and fear, and explore the 
boundaries of love.  In the second hour of this interminable silent 
saga, Mr. Malick finally gets around to showing two parents raising 
their children–attending a barbecue, working in the garden, teaching the 
boys self-defense. They also learn the meaning of cruelty and hate, two 
things the father possesses in abundance. Never having lived up to his 
dream of becoming a musician, Dad is a strict and abusive 
disciplinarian–slapping his wife around, punishing the boys for the 
slightest offense, like talking at the table with your mouth full of 
meat loaf (the only thing the mother ever cooks). The kids witness the 
drowning of a playmate at the swimming pool. The mother hangs the 
laundry on the clothesline and washes her feet with a lawn hose in the 
Texas heat.  Paced at the speed of an inchworm climbing a tomato vine, 
the realism is admirable, but none of it has any trajectory or narrative 
structure.


With his short, stocky frame, thick bifocals and Texas Panhandle burr 
cut, Brad Pitt is perfect as a shapeless, faceless 1950s Everyman, and I 
was especially impressed by Hunter McCracken as the troubled eldest son, 
Jack, who also serves as the lens through which the actions unfold. Not 
a single character is developed beyond a penciled outline, the episodic 
fragments just fly around like popping corn kernels, and instead of 
acting, Mr. Pitt (who also co-produced) is heard on the soundtrack 
saying things like, “You spoke to me through her, before I knew I loved 
you” and “When did you first touch my heart?” Say what?  What is he 
talking about?  God, or his miserable, mistreated wife? There is no 
evidence that anything has ever touched his heart, although the family 
goes soft and sentimental when one of the boys is killed in the wa

Re: [Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious

[Louis Proyect]

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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. 
Ma

Re: [Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious

[Dayne Goodwin]

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I agree.  "Pretentious" is the single best word to describe this film.
I'll quibble with your modifier, the next worst thing is that it was
"interminable."


On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

>
> If there's one reason and only one reason that I put up with so much
> tsuris on this mailing list, it is that it allows me to fulminate every so
> often on things that drive me up a wall.
>
> I am 20 minutes into Terrence Malick's movie and my jaw has dropped
> several times at the self-importance of it all. Just a minute ago, there
> was a dead giveaway on how clueless Malick is despite all his high-falutin'
> style. His film score is made up of various classical works and when I
> heard the strains of Gorecki's Third Symphony, I said to myself, "Of
> course". This neo-Romantic work is a big favorite on the NPR classical
> station, made to order for Obama voters who donate to The Wildlife Fund.
> Using it in a film score today is exactly the same thing as using Samuel
> Barber's Adagio for Strings in "Platoon" and a hundred other "serious"
> movies and TV movies in the 1970s and 80s. Works like this sound great the
> first 5 or 6 times you hear them, but after that it is like you feel you
> are being manipulated.
>
> Frankly, I don't mind being manipulated but with Malick it is like being
> man-handled by a lowland gorilla that just finished drinking a bottle of
> Southern Comfort. Come to think of it, I'd prefer the gorilla.
>

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Re: [Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious

[A Vasquez]

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Have you done an extensive review of this movie? I'd love to read it.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> ==**==**==
> Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> ==**==**==
>
>
> If there's one reason and only one reason that I put up with so much
> tsuris on this mailing list, it is that it allows me to fulminate every so
> often on things that drive me up a wall.
>
> I am 20 minutes into Terrence Malick's movie and my jaw has dropped
> several times at the self-importance of it all. Just a minute ago, there
> was a dead giveaway on how clueless Malick is despite all his high-falutin'
> style. His film score is made up of various classical works and when I
> heard the strains of Gorecki's Third Symphony, I said to myself, "Of
> course". This neo-Romantic work is a big favorite on the NPR classical
> station, made to order for Obama voters who donate to The Wildlife Fund.
> Using it in a film score today is exactly the same thing as using Samuel
> Barber's Adagio for Strings in "Platoon" and a hundred other "serious"
> movies and TV movies in the 1970s and 80s. Works like this sound great the
> first 5 or 6 times you hear them, but after that it is like you feel you
> are being manipulated.
>
> Frankly, I don't mind being manipulated but with Malick it is like being
> man-handled by a lowland gorilla that just finished drinking a bottle of
> Southern Comfort. Come to think of it, I'd prefer the gorilla.
>
> __**__
> Send list submissions to: 
> Marxism@greenhouse.economics.**utah.edu
> Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.**
> utah.edu/mailman/options/**marxism/collationes37%40gmail.**com
>

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[Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious

[Louis Proyect]

==
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
==


If there's one reason and only one reason that I put up with so much 
tsuris on this mailing list, it is that it allows me to fulminate every 
so often on things that drive me up a wall.


I am 20 minutes into Terrence Malick's movie and my jaw has dropped 
several times at the self-importance of it all. Just a minute ago, there 
was a dead giveaway on how clueless Malick is despite all his 
high-falutin' style. His film score is made up of various classical 
works and when I heard the strains of Gorecki's Third Symphony, I said 
to myself, "Of course". This neo-Romantic work is a big favorite on the 
NPR classical station, made to order for Obama voters who donate to The 
Wildlife Fund. Using it in a film score today is exactly the same thing 
as using Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in "Platoon" and a hundred 
other "serious" movies and TV movies in the 1970s and 80s. Works like 
this sound great the first 5 or 6 times you hear them, but after that it 
is like you feel you are being manipulated.


Frankly, I don't mind being manipulated but with Malick it is like being 
man-handled by a lowland gorilla that just finished drinking a bottle of 
Southern Comfort. Come to think of it, I'd prefer the gorilla.



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