The Tree of Life
In a Q&A with David Gordon Green, director of George Washington, All The Real Girls and Your Highness, I asked him to speak to the relationship between his earlier, quiet, contemplative films and his recent stoner comedies. Do we really need more Terrence Malick-type films? That was basically his response. Of course, the answer is yes. For me, a Terrence Malick film is a sort of dreaming, of epic thoughts and visual poetry, and as such, it epitomizes the objective of cinema. As many directors as possible should make Terrence Malick movies, because this sort of actually seeing our world is our world’s epic secret.
Everyone is all about Terrence Malick these days, and it’s great to see, because The Tree of Life is absolutely amazing. I have a personal relationship with it insofar as my artistic ambitions occupy these same spaces: the cosmos entwined in our multitudinous existence, the passing of time and eternity, nostalgia, nature and romance, the sun, the sky, the mind’s eye. The Tree of Life lavishly sings about all of this; I would have liked it more, of course, if I had made it.
The opening chapter to the movie is its grandest, and hypnotically beautiful. It contains breathtaking film from all around the world, and is profoundly poetic in its editing and mental eye. The audio is primarily the protagonist’s voiceover, whispering religious and sentimental thoughts, underscored (or overscored) by a dramatic classical soundtrack. This simple recipe for transcendence is punctuated by its own sense of self, which is ostentatiously triumphant. The film is more operatic than it is cinematic, and pretentious throughout, which furthers its own sensational ego. I don’t know how I feel about this aspect.
Terrence Malick is deft at handling his overflowing material, but just barely. The storyboard - not to be mistaken as any sort of traditional narrative - is awkwardly heavy at times: too much running time is spent on the slices of life as a 1950s child, too little to the boy as a grown man. These are Terrence Malick’s memories (ostensibly), seeped in nostalgia, with shades of love, hatred, fear, ambiguity, confusion, etc. Oh, to be the director himself and totally bask in this film, surely the finest piece of cinema ever made (by its own standards). It is defiantly experimental, and joyous in its unique voice. It is totally grand, so there is a loss, then, of older Malick - or younger Malick as it were: there is no room in this opera for the small pieces of film like Badlands and Days of Heaven, where subdued subtlety and careful delicacy created the emotional moment.
There were times when I thought the sold-out opening weekend audience at the Landmark Sunshine would chuckle or burst out laughing, given the gravitas of certain moments (a la Black Swan), but the film does well at demanding reverence. I was amused by the grandeur of it all, and in love with the feelings it creates. It made me smile deeply and appreciatively, and bordered on a joke the way life itself does. I was disappointed with the screening experience, not specifically because my seat wasn’t ideal or the theater was somewhat awkward, but because we don’t have marble palaces in which to screen cinema. If only theaters were constructed in a more revering, distinguished manner, so that the transcendent experience could be extended to the experiential.
This latest of Malick’s follows his two mid-career pictures, both which feel more traditional to me, though neither really are: The Thin Red Line is a stream-of-consciousness ensemble piece regarding World War II, war in general, the significance of a man’s life, man’s place in nature, and the passage of time which, in 1998, contrasted vividly to the straightforward story being told in Saving Private Ryan. The New World, especially in its very first scene, addresses the cosmic significance of discovery, of mystery, of the creative power of man, all within a historically clear vision of the colonization of America. Neither film, while surely poetic and lush and beautiful, carries the same weight as The Tree of Life, which is interesting, since this film focuses on an even more specific, less weighty story than war or imperial exploration: that of a suburban family. But of course, family, childhood and psychology are intensely probable and philosophical. And of course, the more particular, the more universal.
The Tree of Life is a phenomenon. It manipulates the essential materials of filmmaking: light, time, the world, for the purposes of transcendence, much like the 1992 film, Baraka, or other non-narrated documentaries, like 2005’s Our Daily Bread. But it adds complex characters played by Hollywood stars, and a bravado of spiritual discovery even more ambitious. It is a film to be savored, to be watched again and again, to contemplate and appreciate and love.
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