Terrence Malick (USA, born 1943)
The Tree of Life (2011)
(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)
Of all the films I’ve viewed so far, The Tree of Life is the one which opens itself up most broadly to accusations of pretension, and indeed, there was more than one moment when I was intending to outright call it pretentious when I came to begin my review. This compulsion was most keenly felt when characters solemnly intone short, fragmented phrases in voiceover- phrases that are often whispered, don’t really make much sense, either in or out of isolation, and generally come off contrived and precious, even to the point that they could induce small peals of cynical laughter. While Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, for example, had the ‘excuse’ of irreverent and absurdist undertones, should they be needed, to assuage potential accusations of pretension, The Tree of Life has no such safety net.
Brave, or stupid? Or neither? I don’t know. During the first half, which contains sustained periods devoted solely to imagery, deeply impressionistic, without characters or traditional dialogue, it is questionable whether a viewer whose tastes are exclusively mainstream would even consider this a ‘movie’, by the commonly understood usage of the word, and might assert that it would be more accurately described as a succession of images and sounds, without a unified purpose, or perhaps something more derogatory. The film appears to target areas of the psyche that lie dormant much of the time, areas that deal with memory, and matter, and primordialism, amongst other things, and that our aforementioned mainstream movie viewer is unlikely to respond well to in any way.
Some of it, almost by default, is mesmeric, and resembles what might transpire if Zvyagintsev dialled up the natural imagery in his films and dialled down the more traditional narrative elements, though a narrative does become more foregrounded in the movie’s second half. Then again, I don’t think it carries the inherent grace of Zvyagintsev- it’s kinda clunky. The storyline is weak by most standards- it’s the 1960s, there’s a family, and their three adolescent boys do what Sixties children do; they play, shoot toy guns, chase each other, bicker amongst themselves, and receive admonishments from their father. Most of the film’s second hour is bound up in this cycle. I feel that these scenes might have been more meaningful, and more interesting, if they formed a portrait of the man that this childhood had formed, but they don’t- Sean Penn’s role as the adult Jack is an entirely non-speaking one which didn’t really require an actor of his reputation and stature. I feel that practically any professional actor of the right age and look, certainly one with plenty of experience, could have handled it.
Again, like The White Ribbon and The Return, we see a parent- another male- who administers strict discipline, although in those films, with the exception of The White Ribbon’s clearly abhorrent doctor character, I found their behaviour to be relatively understandable. Not so in this one. There is something decidedly ugly when someone- anyone, but usually a father- is exercising control over a household, and pulling out arbitrary, impromptu new ways to exert power, clearly in exclusive service to their own needs despite any claim to the contrary.
Earlier, I namechecked Malick when reviewing The Assassin, and I can say at least that I did much prefer The Tree of Life to that film. There’s far more to latch on to for a viewer like myself who is not an art film connoisseur but wants to watch films that are thoughtful and substantial, even when I feel that they somewhat fail in their aims. We’re never impelled to look at a given image for more than around 10 seconds, and I would query as to whether this qualifies as ‘slow cinema’ at all; it isn’t what I would have in mind where the term is concerned.
Ultimately, my feelings on the movie are very mixed. It made more sense to me, and was more digestible, than Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but still, I have full sympathy for someone who made sure they watched the entire film, so they could have an informed judgement, and made every effort to watch it with an open mind, then subsequently wondered what the hell Terrence Malick was playing at, and why the dinosaurs and the cosmos were necessary or relevant in the overall context of the piece. The extent, however, to which the movie is an entity unto itself is such that it almost seems impervious to criticism. It would be like criticising a rock formation, or a field, or a flock of birds. You might not always be stunned into silence by their majesty, but it matters none- it won’t change their course, they’re gonna do their own thing either way. Then again, maybe I’m giving the film too much credit in comparing it to indelible, and inherently beautiful, aspects of the natural landscape. I haven’t gilded any other film thus far with that kind of stately comparison, and there’ve been a great many that I’ve liked far more. Maybe it’s the flow of the film that gives off this impression, as it sometimes seems to reflect the organic progression of nature rather than conscious, contemplated, human choice.
I suspect that The Tree of Life might be better understood as part of Terrence Malick’s wider filmography, especially 2016’s Voyage of Time. This may have been the case, too, regarding the quiet, mild charms of The Gleaners & I, made as it was by a filmmaker with a sixty-year career whom Martin Scorcese called ‘one of the gods of cinema’. And Certified Copy may well make more sense as part of Abbas Kiarostami’s substantial filmography. In any case, like Margaret, The Tree of Life also exists in a second, significantly longer version, another potential source of clarity and context. Unlike Margaret, this longer version is not purported to be closer to the director’s vision, but is simply a new, different cut, which I will watch and review separately later.
The New World (2005)
(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)
Like a handful of other films on this Top 100 list, The New World has been released in different versions of varying length. The longest, a 172-minute version, is the one that I purchased, so unlike other films which are reviewed twice, I am, in this case, simply going to cover The New World’s extended cut, and leave it at that.
Just as when I began Far From Heaven, there was a certain amount of pre-judgement in play based on the director’s previous Top 100 movie. In this case, I had particularly disliked The Tree of Life’s breathy little voiceovers that sounded like cut-up and re-assembled love letters or poems. Such an approach was not immediately apparent in The New World, and I felt that it started quite brightly. Set in the early 1600s and concerning the settling of English explorers in coastal Virginia, the visuals are breathtaking, like being in a William Hodges painting, as is the commitment to realism that dictates the native tribes speak the historic Algonquin language.
It was all ticking along quite nicely. The fledgling romance that develops between Colin Farrell’s John Smith and Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas, traversing a language barrier, was touching and sweet, as was the mutual respect between the two tribes, intermingling with the understandable guardedness and circumspection.
Obviously, that can’t last, especially when the natives start to realise that the newcomers, who they thought were only temporary, aren’t going anywhere. This culminates in a very well-shot battle scene that feels climactic but does in fact occur when there is around an hour and forty minutes left of the movie to go. From here, The New World starts to move through a series of episodes- Smith becomes the head of his unit, turning out to be a poor and unconvincing leader, while his estrangement from Pocahontas causes their relationship to become fractured.
It is also around this point that the whispery, fragmented voiceovers made a re-appearance. I wouldn’t have minded if their use was sparing, or if the utterances meant anything to me. Unfortunately, neither of these things transpired and I felt that the film descended into a whirlpool of crushing tedium and questionable coherence. In particular, the actual dialogue, that the characters actually use to speak to each other, was interfered with, sometimes because Malick inexplicably chooses to overlay a voiceover on top of speech, but most of the time simply because the editing prevents the exchanges from having beginnings, middles and ends. Often someone will say something and the other person won’t even answer, but instead sort of look off into the middle distance- then we cut away, to yet another brief and infuriating communiqué. Elsewhere, we have abundant shots of rivers and trees and grass- beautiful, to be sure, but when the human story is so frustratingly deficient, these sequences might as well have been spliced in from a nature documentary.
This was a right royal chore to sit through. I may not have found Ten compelling, and I may not have always felt its exchanges were worth listening to, but at least they were clear and made sense. Why won’t Malick let his characters speak? I am starting to get the distinct impression that he and me are simply not viable bedfellows, something I will have to try to put aside as I attempt to objectively tackle The Tree of Life’s three-hour alternative cut.
The Tree of Life (extended alternative version) (2018)
(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)
Just over an hour into this extended edit of Terrence Malick’s hulking opus, Brad Pitt’s father character, Mr O’Brien, is extolling his worldview to his three boys in the car. ‘The wrong people go hungry,’ he tells them. ‘The wrong people get loved. The world lives by trickery. If you want to succeed, you can’t be too good.’
The sons are smiling and playing with a dog at the time, and one of them tries to adjust the radio, so we can reasonably surmise that they’re not really paying much attention. But if you say something enough times, then it will inevitably start to have some sort of effect on your audience, especially when, as in this case, they don’t really have any other choice but to listen to your theories. Underpinning the questionable issue of filling young boys’ heads with this sort of thinking, and expecting them to be interested in it, is the implication of the speaker’s high level of virtue. Some of his statements, almost by law of averages, are true- the wrong people do often get loved, and though The Wolf of Wall Street was by no means a documentary, it purports to be based on real events, and can still serve as sound indication that the world, to a significant extent, does live by trickery. But the central theme of his utterances, disguised as sage, dutiful advice, is that he himself is too good for this world- too decent, too honest, too upstanding. If he was more of a crook, he would have ‘made it’. As touched on in my first review for the movie, this apparent no-nonsense, unvarnished wisdom is in fact serving selfish needs.
I could see now that O’Brien is a profoundly unhappy man, and through this sort of rumination he is able to recontextualise his own failures, presumably making himself feel temporarily better in the process. It’s sometimes difficult to see exactly what his specific problem is, especially through modern eyes and through the context of economic hardship. He appears to be unsatisfied with his job, but it provides enough for him to live in a perfectly presentable house on what looks like an extremely pleasant, quiet, crime-free street. His sons are all healthy, none of them are tearaways, and his wife is beautiful, respectable and dedicated to him and the boys.
For a while, I felt that he had emerged as the key character in this version of the film. Of course, I remembered his behaviour from the first time around, but I had some sympathy for him in the beginning stages of this re-tread; it’s clear that he wants his sons to both like and respect him, as he wrestles with them in the front yard and sometimes grabs them at the dinner table in clumsy but understandable gestures of jocular affection. The sympathy, however, started to dissipate around the point where he made this small speech in the car. As the film goes on, there doesn’t seem to be any plateau to his disciplinarian tactics- he seems to feel the need to keep pushing them further and further, behaviour which smacks of immaturity and resounding deficiencies in judgement and self-control. The grandmother character played by Fiona Shaw calls him a ‘weak spirit’ and even proposes that he is jealous of his own children. His wife confides to her brother that ‘he works the men under him too hard. Nobody likes him. It’s not that he’s a cold or selfish man, but he turns people against him. He offends them almost on purpose’ (incidentally, I believe she is wrong where the selfishness is concerned). Immediately following these comments, O’Brien becomes belligerent at the sight of his sons having fun with their uncle, exactly like an overgrown child who is not getting enough attention, and essentially orders the man out of the house.
Some of this conduct might be a little more excusable if he was still in his twenties, but he isn’t, he’s in his forties, and it’s pathetic. Why did Jessica Chastain’s mother character marry him? It is solely because it was ‘the done thing’ in the 1950s to find a husband without delay and marry young, come hell or high water? The couple simply don’t seem suited to each other, even when you consider that the majority of women would likely have struggled with him; there is absolutely no reason why this sweet, kind, warm-hearted woman of strong spirit and good sense would want to be with him at all.
As I similarly experienced when re-appraising Margaret, I found that the extended version of this movie was a deeper, more legible experience than its condensed counterpart, and even with my limited first-hand knowledge of his filmography, I strongly suspect that this is Malick’s filmmaking at its fullest and richest expression. The movie has the scope and the intention of an epic, and at this length, it feels as if these epic qualities are more effectively brought forth. I found that one of the most prevalent aspects of the film was its portrait of childhood- both childhood in general, and a childhood lived a certain way in a certain specific era. I can see now why Sean Penn’s Jack looks back constantly on his formative years- they were the only time he got to spend with his brothers. I can see now how weird it must have been- how wrenching- to grow up with two siblings yet live your entire adult life as an only child. Your adolescence would inevitably take on enormous personal significance- mythical, mystical, and almost close enough to touch, yet gone forever.
One could argue that Mr O’Brien has somewhat ruined a childhood that would have otherwise been positively idyllic, especially when you consider how precious these years would later go on to be in memory. The movie doesn’t make such an accusation outright, as such, but perhaps what I find most frustrating is how unnecessary his conduct is. There’s absolutely no need for it. The boys are fine- they’re not even particularly rambunctious. If you’re extremely disappointed with your lot, as he is, and you feel the world is against you, as he does, then why transpose these problems onto your kids? Why not keep it to yourself and maybe talk these feelings through with your wife, in private, after they have gone to bed? Why not discuss it with your friends over beers?
O’Brien doesn’t seem to have that second option. His friends are conspicuous by their absence, and in this we can perhaps detect that Malick is offering a gesture of understanding toward those sorts of people that- quote unquote- ‘nobody likes’. Of the traits that can lead to such a thing, O’Brien displays many- profound lack of consideration for other peoples’ thoughts and feelings is probably the main one, followed swiftly by a common sense bypass and an apparent belief that if he stubbornly carries on behaving in this way, with no compromise, then one day he will wake up to find that, at long last, the rest of the world has done the decent thing and fallen into his insistent rhythms.
This gesture of understanding does not take the contrived form of attempting to show the behaviour in a palatable light. Instead, it gives us a textured, contemplative glimpse into the more human sides of contentious, grating, obnoxious, arrogant people- one senses that O’Brien wants to be a good father, a good husband, and probably a good boss too, but lacks the tools, and in all likelihood this quality stems from his own childhood and his relationship with his own father.
Like other long films we’ve covered, particularly Yi Yi, the extended cut of Margaret, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, this version of The Tree of Life is something of a sprawl, with hints of directorial over-indulgence and potential lack of discipline. This is not necessarily a bad thing- Memento, for example, was extremely neat and tightly structured, yet left me cold. While I still have a certain amount of doubt concerning The Tree of Life’s ‘masterpiece’ status, and I’m still not sure if the content really follows through on the meaning it’s afforded, these sorts of concerns are pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. What I saw this time around was a work of substantial thematic weight and some genuinely compelling character-based discourse. Like Far From Heaven, it was also a sad and longing look into the past, into a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, it asks how we deal with bereavement, and the answer is that we don’t really, we simply learn to sort of co-exist with it and carry it with us forever, in some faded, pale, meagre version of acceptance.