Terrence Malick has never made a film I didn’t like, so it is unsurprising that his most recent work, The Tree of Life (2011), struck my fancy. It has almost become a cliché to call Malick a “visual poet,” but this ignores the role of sound. Lets call him a maker of “cinematic poetry.” Many scenes in The Tree of Life and in other Malick films seem less like cogs in a narrative wheel than poetic interludes or ruminations in a cosmic pastiche. The Tree of Life unfurls as an ambitious attempt to relate the individual lives of one family living in Waco, Texas, in the 1950s (the parents played by Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt), to nothing less than the cosmic forces of creation, evolution, and questions of ultimate meaning. The film interweaves impressionistic scenes of this family’s life with images and sounds that are meant to express nothing less than the sublimity of the universe, thus relating creation on the minute scale of a single family to that of the cosmos itself. The Chastain character states early on that everyone must choose between the “way of nature” and the “way of grace,” and this film explores the implications of cruel and unforgiving nature and the possibility of something good (or transcendent?) within and beyond it.
The relations, or comparisons, between the cosmic and the individual are often subtle, however, and many audiences seem to miss their significance. Malick draws on a storehouse of Christian theology (and more broadly, the Judeo-Christian imagination), but frames the film not as a series of answers but as questions. This question-asking is also characteristic of his earlier films The Thin Red Line and The New World, both of which feature voice-over narration consisting in part of questions without clear answers.
I heard an interview with a theater manager who estimates that 5-10% of the audience walks out of each screening of the film. Some walk out for the expected reasons. If you demand the narrative tightness of the usual Hollywood film, you will be sorely disappointed. I suspect that others walk out because they don’t understand what Malick is doing. If the audience misses the correlations between the representation of the family and Malick’s metaphysical interests, the film can seem an awful bore, perhaps even pretentious. Thus the reactions to the film, which won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, have ranged from the rapturous to the contemptuous.
I don’t see the film as pretentious but rather ambitious. I admire it in the same way that I admired Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which I first saw when I was ten years old. In fact, The Tree of Life is full of humility, in that Malick doesn’t pretend to have the answers. I remember that the famed critic Pauline Kael, who disliked Kubrick immensely, responded to 2001 with scorn, seemingly for its very ambition. Kael seemed to think that films ought to remain in the realm of the mundane and the physical, and that Kubrick’s attempt to make nothing less than a myth of humanity was lame and pretentious. I say that if to ask the sorts of questions Kubrick and Malick do in the medium of film is pretentious, then lets have more pretension.
I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s reaction to the film.
Carl Plantinga
Carl, I’m writing rather off the cuff and based upon my impressions of hearing about and finally seeing the movie in the theater. Before seeing the film, I had read some reactions from various viewers. Some praised the film for narrative creativity, beauty, and artistic vision; based on these reviews I was determined to see the movie, despite living in an area that is less than receptive to experimental films, which I expected this movie to be. Other comments were hostile, even downright angry at the movie. I wondered to myself what in the film was so offensive as to provoke these responses.
When I finally was able to see the film, I loved it. The sheer beauty of the images did not disappoint. And perhaps my experience was a bit atypical, since I found the movie extremely nostalgic, to the point that I recognized several locations used in the movie. In addition to real places that I had been, there was the sense of place and time represented by a small Texas community in the 50s. My own experience was during the 60s, but I can tell you that not much had changed in the small towns where my grandparents lived, making this movie one that I found very familiar.
I found the whole project very lovingly executed and, yes, ambitious; however, like you, I wanted to applaud Malick for his boldness of vision. There were about 10 people in the theater when I saw the film; by the end, there were about 5 or 6 left. I wondered if some had not come merely to laugh, because they stayed only about 30 minutes into the movie before giving up on it.
I would love to talk more about the film. Thanks for your thoughtful “defense.”
Something that puzzles me about the critical reception of this film is that its negative aspects have not been clearly outlined. In other words, the negative reactions to the film show a pattern of 1) poorly informed opinions (people who did not watch the film until the end, or that having done so did not manage to identify the two main narrative blocks of the film) 2) driven by personal and negative emotional responses either to the contents of the film (the religious, spiritual and moral aspects of the story) or to the supposed pretentious ambition of Terrence Malick (as if a director could not aim at being ambitious).
Without wanting to sound arrogant, I have not yet come across a solid argumentation against the film, one that goes beyond the personal issues one might have (related with aesthetics/religious content) or to our incomplete/unsatisfactory understanding of the narrative.
The absence of such sustained argumentation has simply made me embrace the awesome power of this film, and move on to a deeper understanding of TM’s work. I believe this is one of those rare films that inscribes itself in film history in the moment of its release.
I have therefore engaged in a very satisfactory (and pleasant, at least personally) study of TM’s films, and cannot stop the amazement of seeing how solid his “search” has been, from his early “Days of Heaven” (1973), “Badlands” (1978) up to a more recent “The Thin Red Line” (1998). See, to me “The Tree of Life” is not a mere accident (either positive or negative) but the ultimate result of TM’s life and work.
TM’s films go beyond the apparent simplicity or mere lyricism. They go beyond quick fixed judgements and rejections that critics and scholars sometimes shoot. To me it represents a contemporary trend of independent cinema, one where directors pursue unique aesthetics through embodied aspects of our perception. This is what interests me, and it is why, in my PhD thesis, I am looking at TM’s films from a proprioceptive point of view.
I believe this film, and TM’s work, will worth and speak for itself in the future, and it will probably be looked with more consideration, but in the meantime, it does seem strangely necessary to defend it.
Luis Rocha-Antunes