Vats of ink (or pixels) have been spilled in pontificating, pro and con, on maverick filmmaker Terrence Malick’s latest opus, The Tree of Life (2011, MC-85, NFX). Though most critic polls rank it #1 for the year, there have been some vociferous naysayers, and moviegoers demanding their money back. My expectations -- based on previous Malick films,all of which I’ve re-watched in the past few months, and widespread critical raptures -- were so high that I was primed for disappointment if I came out of the first viewing anything less than transfigured.
It turned out pretty close, partly because I was so enraptured with the Clark’s newfound projection and sound capacity, installed for live opera in HD and now available for my screenings, which Tree of Life exploited to maximum advantage. Now that I’ve watched the film again on a smaller screen, I feel ready to have my own say on the subject.
I am among those who are thrilled by Malick’s inscriptions on the cave wall, his philosophical essays in the language of cinema. I am happy to read his thoughts through his images, forsaking conventional narrative but ransacking nature, personal experience, and film history for beauty and meaning. His interrogative -- or slantwise -- voiceover narrations (or overheard voices) are an annoyance to some, but a provocative polyphony to me. I find him highly intelligible and expressive of deep personal feelings, sensations, and memories. Others may find his puzzles cold and merely pretty, but to me they are profoundly moving pictures.
Nobody thinks that Malick’s films are just okay. Either you are entranced, or you consider his work, whatever its merits, an affront against cinematic storytelling. But even among those who are susceptible to his magic, argument persists over whether this film or that film is a masterpiece, a flawed masterpiece, or just a piece of crap.
Nearly everyone is on board with Badlands (1973, NFX), partly because the storyline is so familiar from other films and TV -- a couple of killer kids on the run -- that you can overlook how strange the approach to that story is. And then there are Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek at the beginning of stellar careers, just exuding a fresh camera-capturing allure. That Sheen is a dead ringer for James Dean is no small part of his character Kit, as he tries to make himself a celebrity by shooting his way across the desolate West, with teenage doll Sissy providing the drugstore-magazine narration. Her lack of meaningful affect, and the eye-popping expanse of Western landscapes, situate the true-crime violence in art-house territory, so everybody gets what they are looking for. An impressive debut, but not my favorite of Malick’s films.
Days of Heaven (1978, NFX), however, is close. I’ve found three different occasions to show it in Clark film series. I think it’s a monumental achievement in a mere 94 minutes. Though it again relies on a familiar story -- of two lovers conspiring against her husband -- some people find the plot thin, but I find it elemental, just one of the agents in a dense compound. Some find the actors (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard) expressionless, but I find their archetypal masks expressive portraits in a wider landscape. Some find the young girl’s narration tacked on, but I find it a form of demotic philosophy (“There never were a perfect person.”), which is another strong element making the whole combust. But the visuals, oh my god, the visuals – with the grandeur of the West Texas grasslands caught at magic hour, just glowing with transcendence, and with the up-close details of indifferent but exquisite nature! Nestor Almendros, cameraman for Truffaut and Rohmer, won the Oscar for cinematography. I love the sheer sweep of the story, set in 1917, from Chicago ironworks, to amber waves of grain on the prairie, to the river of no escape, and finally the troop trains departing for World War I. Appropriate to the era, it is almost a silent movie. When I showed it at the Clark last summer, there was a problem with the speaker set-up and it took me ten minutes to realize that the dialogue track was missing.
Returning after two decades of reclusive disappearance, Malick adapted a James Jones novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998, NFX). Despite his characteristically aestheticized approach, this turns out to be a highly visceral war movie, with about as clear a picture of a military operation as I’ve ever seen on film. The approach to battle of each character is individuated, as are the reactions of the captured Japanese at the end of the action. But the narration is totally de-inviduated, it’s never really clear who is speaking, and the voice frequently does not match the character in the picture. Like a patchwork quilt of sound, it is meant to express the collective voice of men in combat, but it’s too dense and undifferentiated. Nonetheless the action sequences are amazingly effective, even when they focus on the tall waving grasses into which the soldiers plunge, just as the three brothers in Tree of Life do, and other signature shots of sublime nature indifferent to man’s scurrying about. The cast is a lengthy who’s who of acting talent, but none gets to stand out in the ensemble. Malick is hard on his actors in a variety of ways -- delivering on the morning of the shoot not written dialogue but questions for the character to address, and then in the end leaving most of the performance on the cutting room floor, and even cutting voice free from image -- but they still flock to work with him. In the end, however, this is the Malick film that might be too much of a good thing.
The one I can’t get enough of is The New World (2005, NFX). That was one of the first Blu-Ray discs I got to project in full high-def at the Clark, and it had an extended cut of almost three hours, which for me did not drag a minute too long. I simply love this movie, and if I were still assigning numerical grades to films, this would be a rare *10*. The sense of discovery, of being transported from one world into another, the strangeness, the disorientation, the wonder – all are made palpable in this historical vision of the clash of civilizations in the wilderness. The Pocahantas story is familiar, but never so compelling as here, in the enchanting performance of Q’Orianka Kilcher. Colin Farrell neatly demythologizes Capt. John Smith. The rest of the acting (much of which is close to dance) is solid, and the set design meticulously real, but the most artful of artisans is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Tree of Life. Much of the narration is meant to be fleetingly intelligible, since a key theme of the film is the difficulty of translation, through words or through the body, English to Indian, Indian to England. So for me this remains the most rapturously perfect, the transcendent Malick film.
The Tree of Life might be my choice for best film of 2011, but is only middle of the pack among Malick’s films as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps illogically, a comparison stuck in my mind. Like a Jackson Pollack painting, this celestial Tree is simultaneously cosmic and deeply, deeply personal. I was not swept away by the scenes of Sean Penn as the adult Jack O’Brien, an architect among the glassy spires of a modern city (I assume Houston), mourning the long-ago death of his brother and the childhood they shared in 1950s Waco. But situating a single family’s life in the whole span of existence from the big bang to the big get-together on the further shore, I buy into. And the sensuous portrayal of a 50s boyhood is so close to the bone, so profoundly memorious, that I watched the film in ecstasies of retrospective reverie. The three brothers are all convincingly depicted, while Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are superlative as the parents. Even people who have no patience at all for Malick’s more portentous fusions of evolution and spiritual teleology, acknowledge the touching immediacy of the growing-up scenes. I was more tolerant than some of the metaphoric conclusion, when all the characters are milling around on the beach, because I saw it less as an obviously religious consolation and more as an aesthetic one, a cinematic mash-up of Fellini’s 8½ and Bergman’s Persona, a pleasant evocation of two of the very best films ever. Overall, I find The Tree of Life luminous and numinous, offering a sensory apprehension of cosmic connection.
I note that this long-growing Tree seems to have resolved and released something in Malick, so that after finishing five films in forty years, he has almost that many now in various stages of production. I salute him for making his own thoughts and feelings so watchable, and look forward avidly to watching more.
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