The Tree of Life

[adolfwolfli]

First off I'll say that Malick is one of my favorite living filmmakers.  "Days of Heaven" is one of my favorite films of all time, and I think "The New World" is grossly underrated.  "The Thin Red Line" is incredible, just monumental.  My wife and I wouldn't be together if not for our shared love of Malick's films – we discussed him on our first date, and there was a still from "Days of Heaven" printed on our wedding program.  

[SPOILER ALERT]

Now that that's out of the way, I was disappointed with "Tree of Life".  I think there are long sections that contain some of the most haunting, beautiful work of Malick's career, but the New Age/Christian sappiness of the last quarter of the film really left a bad taste in my mouth.  Malick has always shown himself to be a spiritual filmmaker, interested in big ideas, man's place in the universe, etc., but, as an atheist, I understand now why the French booed this film at Cannes.  I'm not saying that a film can't have Christian or Catholic content, or undertones, in order for me to like it – I love "The Last Temptation of Christ", for instance – but "Tree" just becomes very corny with its depiction of an afterlife.  Even if this was not Malick's intent, I still think the film just falls apart toward the end.  The Sean Penn sequences aren't fleshed out enough, and mainly consist of a befuddled-looking Penn wandering around and staring at stuff.  It just felt awkward and it made me uncomfortable.

I think there is a masterpiece embedded within this film.  If Malick were to excise the evolutionary sequences and the last segment, he'd be left with an incredibly moving, wonderfully evocative depiction of a mid-century boyhood.  All of the scenes with the family were amazing.  I can't think of any film that so beautifully depicts the sensory impressions, moods, confusion, naivete and joy of childhood.  But then it soon derails into treacly sentimentality.  

That's my two cents, and I'm interested to hear what others think.    

[socketlevel]

**SPOILS***

I think there is a masterpiece embedded within this film.  If Malick were to excise the evolutionary sequences and the last segment, he'd be left with an incredibly moving, wonderfully evocative depiction of a mid-century boyhood.  All of the scenes with the family were amazing.  I can't think of any film that so beautifully depicts the sensory impressions, moods, confusion, naivete and joy of childhood.  But then it soon derails into treacly sentimentality.  

I think you're spot on, and to go on a bit with what you're saying if you don't mind. Maybe the evolutionary sequences could have been the last segment. To cut between the Grace and Nature in it's purest form. Then either leave the film with that, or cut back to Penn.

[Robyn]

I fucking suck at not reading spoiler when I don't want to read a spoiler on a movie that i haven't seen when i', drunk.

Anywhay, I can't wait to see this one., To baf that it dosn't show in the theaters where I live. I'm planing to go to stockholm and see tree of life and melancholia next weekend. Can't waiit!

[modage]

**SPOILS***

I think there is a masterpiece embedded within this film.  If Malick were to excise the evolutionary sequences and the last segment, he'd be left with an incredibly moving, wonderfully evocative depiction of a mid-century boyhood.  All of the scenes with the family were amazing.  I can't think of any film that so beautifully depicts the sensory impressions, moods, confusion, naivete and joy of childhood.  But then it soon derails into treacly sentimentality.  

I think you're spot on, and to go on a bit with what you're saying if you don't mind. Maybe the evolutionary sequences could have been the last segment. To cut between the Grace and Nature in it's purest form. Then either leave the film with that, or cut back to Penn.

Can I agree with this too or is that a shallow argument?

[MacGuffin]

Perspective: A little splice of heaven
When filmmakers through the years have conjured up images of the hereafter, the results have all too often been hellishly clichéd, and 'The Tree of Life' is only the latest example.


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-movie-heaven-20110612,0,7537845.story

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

**SPOILS***

I think there is a masterpiece embedded within this film.  If Malick were to excise the evolutionary sequences and the last segment, he'd be left with an incredibly moving, wonderfully evocative depiction of a mid-century boyhood.  All of the scenes with the family were amazing.  I can't think of any film that so beautifully depicts the sensory impressions, moods, confusion, naivete and joy of childhood.  But then it soon derails into treacly sentimentality.  

I think you're spot on, and to go on a bit with what you're saying if you don't mind. Maybe the evolutionary sequences could have been the last segment. To cut between the Grace and Nature in it's purest form. Then either leave the film with that, or cut back to Penn.

Can I agree with this too or is that a shallow argument?

Of course you can, but once again YOU'RE BEING FUCKING GLIB.  It's like you think sheer pompous force is all it takes.

I apologize for trying to police the conversation.  I really do.  I want to step back from this not in a bigger-better man sort of way, because I can be vindictive too, but just because this wasn't even my intention.  I want to talk about the movie.  Simple.  That's all I've wanted.  It was wrong of me to imply that I know the proper way to talk about the movie and you don't, and it's wrong of me to criticize your opinions because you can't present them in a contagious or comprehensive manner.  I don't look forward to your reiteration of this fact (you not liking ToL) on every page, after a person attempts to explain how the film was meaningful for them, but you don't look forward to hearing more people praise a movie you don't like.  I'm not expressing the tolerance I feel is necessary for rational debate when I personalize attacks at you.  I no longer will.  And please stop ribbing me.

[Sleepless]

Now that that's out of the way, I was disappointed with "Tree of Life".  I think there are long sections that contain some of the most haunting, beautiful work of Malick's career, but the New Age/Christian sappiness of the last quarter of the film really left a bad taste in my mouth.  Malick has always shown himself to be a spiritual filmmaker, interested in big ideas, man's place in the universe, etc., but, as an atheist, I understand now why the French booed this film at Cannes.  I'm not saying that a film can't have Christian or Catholic content, or undertones, in order for me to like it – I love "The Last Temptation of Christ", for instance – but "Tree" just becomes very corny with its depiction of an afterlife.  Even if this was not Malick's intent, I still think the film just falls apart toward the end.  The Sean Penn sequences aren't fleshed out enough, and mainly consist of a befuddled-looking Penn wandering around and staring at stuff.  It just felt awkward and it made me uncomfortable.  

I agree with this. I honestly didn't think much of the religious stuff personally, to me it just informed the characters. I took away something different from the film entirely. It only bothered me when my Christian wife fixated on that as we discussed the film afterwards (like you, I am an atheist too). But so what? Still a good film.

It's been a few days since I saw it now, and I sat down earlier to write a blog on it (I'll share the link once I post it). I had basically come to the same conclusion as you, that's it's those final moments which detract from what is otherwise an incredibly nuanced and touching film. It's that bloody door in the desert and the reunion on the beach which reminds me of the end of Tim Burton's Big Fish. But more than anything it's the sharp transition from a film focused on natural beauty and human emotions into a film concerned with symbolism and the abstract. Please don't take this as a cue to restart that impressionist debate.

adolfwolfli, you've had a few really good posts the past couple of days. More please.

[Jeremy Blackman]

This isn't a case of right and wrong, it's a case of "worked for me" or "didn't work for me." Most movies are like that, but I think ToL is especially. It doesn't benefit at all from antagonistic discussion.

I said it in my initial review... If you don't like this, you are not wrong. It's just not for you.

Aside from talking amongst ourselves, no one has been trying to evangelize this or push it on the skeptics. That would be silly, and it wouldn't even work. Also, no one has said mod is wrong or unenlightened for disliking ToL. Because really, when someone says they don't like the wandering scene, or they think that some of the images are heavy-handed, I accept that. I reacted to it differently, and my experience is also valid. This is basic.

This has been a pretty nuanced discussion about the actual content and meaning of the film, and about how we interpret it. Being hostile (out of nowhere) to people who really liked this film is baffling.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo. For some reason it needs to be asserted, over and over again, that the primary purpose of movies is to provide entertainment, that the reason everyone goes to the movies is to have fun. Any suggestion to the contrary, and any film that dares, however modestly, to depart from the orthodoxies of escapist ideology, is met with dismissal and ridicule.

Even though, in the bottom-line, real-world scheme of things, the commercial prospects of a movie like "Meek's Cutoff" are marginal — and even though the distributors of foreign-language films can only dream of such marginality — it is still somehow necessary, every so often, to drag "art movies" into the dock as examples of snobbery, pretense or a suspect form of aesthetic nutritionalism. Vegetables! Yuck! And the supposedly more sophisticated arenas of cultural discourse are hardly immune.

Last year there was a big kerfuffle at Cannes when the jury dared to give the top prize to "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," Apichatpong Weerasethakul's dreamy and oblique spiritual head-trip through the jungles of his native Thailand. This year a different jury gave the Palme d'Or to "The Tree of Life," Terrence Malick's dreamy and oblique spiritual head trip through the bungalows of his native Texas. And while much love has been showered on that movie — including by me, once it opened here — it was also met with scattered boos at the press screening and corresponding sourness among some critics. Writing in TruthDig, the venerable Time critic Richard Schickel strikes out against Mr. Malick's "twaddling pretenses," seeing them as the latest example of what he calls "The 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' scam," after Alain Resnais's quintessential art film of 1959.

For Mr. Schickel the problem with "The Tree of Life" is not just that it isn't a good movie ("inept" is his succinct appraisal of Mr. Malick's skill), but also, more seriously, that it gets the medium wrong. Movies, Mr. Schickel writes, "are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there's always a small audience available for these noble strivings — and good for them, I guess."

Yes, good for them. I will stipulate that Mr. Schickel has forgotten more film history than I will ever know, but in this instance his summary of that history strikes me as strangely narrow. A whole lot of cinema, past and present, falls into that "other ways of making movies" category, and dismissing it outright in the name of fun risks throwing out quite a few masterpieces with the bathwater.

In Mr. Schickel's argument, "pretentious" functions, like "boring" elsewhere, as an accusation that it is almost impossible to refute, since it is a subjective hunch masquerading as a description. Manohla, you had some reservations about "The Tree of Life," but your dispatch on it from Cannes emphasized its self-evident and disarming sincerity. Sincerity is the opposite of pretentiousness, and while it is certainly possible to be puzzled or annoyed by Mr. Malick's philosophical tendencies or unmoved by the images he composes or the story he tells, I don't think there is any pretending involved. (And while we're at it, if "The Hangover Part II" is a quintessentially boring movie in its refusal to do anything new or daring beyond a few instances of easy, sophomoric shock-humor, is there a recent movie more deserving of being called pretentious than "Thor"?)

Why is it, though, that "serious" is a bad word in cultural conversations, or at least in discussions of film? Why is thinking about a movie an activity to be avoided, and a movie that seems to require thinking a source of suspicion? It seems unlikely, to say the least, that films like "Uncle Boonmee," "Meek's Cutoff," "The Tree of Life" or Jean-Luc Godard's recently and belatedly opened "Film Socialisme" will threaten the hegemony of the blockbusters, so why is so much energy expended in defending the prerogatives of entertainment from the supposed threat of seriousness? I certainly don't think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art. And while I derive great pleasure from some movies that might be described as slow or tedious, I also find food for thought in fast, slick, whimsical entertainments. I would like to think there is room in the cinematic diet for various flavors, including some that may seem, on first encounter, unfamiliar or even unpleasant. A. O. SCOTT

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/movies/films-in-defense-of-slow-and-boring.html?_r=3

Not directed at anyone (seriously), I always like these "film is art" articles, even if they're a little duh and repetitive (their main points are common).

[Jeremy Blackman]

I saw that was an A. O. Scott article and immediately searched the text for "tour de force," only to be disappointed.

(Don't believe me?)

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

I bet if he had one more paragraph...

[pete]

yeah I got really irked at the "pretentious" jabs too. it really feels like we are beyond that now, and the shock of "pretentious" as a form of reduction has worn out. it's like conservative people still think calling people "PC" packs a sting; some words go back to being words after their era en vogue is bygone. pretentious is one of them. every once in a while you find a new use for it - but as a general rule of thumb you should try to be interesting with your observation and hopefully apply it to realms unassociated with it from before.

because, "pretentious" never functioned more than a reduction of an aesthetic, before it had a name. i remembered when 28 days later came out and some dude I know said it was a "film school experiment" and was pretty proud of himself for his reduction. reduction is only useful when it's insightful; it's like if I was to talk to some red state fan of Larry the Cable Guy - I wouldn't call him "offensive", because whether or not the guy agrees he's offensive, he's probably used to that reduction and my observation is useless in the dialogue. true or not, who gives a cunt?

so that's my complaint of the pretentious argument, even if it's true (which it isn't) - it's essentially a bland statement still riding the coat tail of the charge it packed amongst critics in newspapers from 20 years ago. because it's an irrelevant word, it becomes impossible to even have a reaction to it - thus resulting in emboldening the person who says it, and tiring the person who hears it. it's like missing your target completely and gloating as if you nailed it, leaving your target impatient and indifferent.

and that's what happens when you attack with antiquated arsenal.

[Stefen]

yeah I got really irked at the "pretentious" jabs too. it really feels like we are beyond that now, and the shock of "pretentious" as a form of reduction has worn out. it's like conservative people still think calling people "PC" packs a sting; some words go back to being words after their era en vogue is bygone. pretentious is one of them. every once in a while you find a new use for it - but as a general rule of thumb you should try to be interesting with your observation and hopefully apply it to realms unassociated with it from before.

because, "pretentious" never functioned more than a reduction of an aesthetic, before it had a name. i remembered when 28 days later came out and some dude I know said it was a "film school experiment" and was pretty proud of himself for his reduction. reduction is only useful when it's insightful; it's like if I was to talk to some red state fan of Larry the Cable Guy - I wouldn't call him "offensive", because whether or not the guy agrees he's offensive, he's probably used to that reduction and my observation is useless in the dialogue. true or not, who gives a cunt?

so that's my complaint of the pretentious argument, even if it's true (which it isn't) - it's essentially a bland statement still riding the coat tail of the charge it packed amongst critics in newspapers from 20 years ago. because it's an irrelevant word, it becomes impossible to even have a reaction to it - thus resulting in emboldening the person who says it, and tiring the person who hears it. it's like missing your target completely and gloating as if you nailed it, leaving your target impatient and indifferent.

and that's what happens when you attack with antiquated arsenal.

If there were legit conservative people on this board one of them would respond to your post about how people shouldn't label others pretentious with "stop being so pretentious!" because they would think that is a really funny quip.

[Fernando]

Watch: Christopher Nolan & David Fincher Talk 'The Tree Of Life' In New Featurette

Here

[socketlevel]

***SPOILER***

I don't mind pretense on to itself Pete. I think all of malick's films post Badlands are pretentious. I really love them all. What I don't like is when pretense meets cliche; when the easy road is taken instead of other creative choices. I hold Malick to a higher standard than that and obviously i feel he fell short.

The Dali quote I gave before kinda spoke directly to my issue with the film. I hope you don't think I'm being Glib. I'm not sure if that's directed my way. I've tried to narrow in on why I don't like it. Quite possibly not doing good enough of a job. But since this was a profound experience for a few of you, you might also see where some of us feel like your reaction is just as much a knee jerk as you claim ours is.

If this was the first movie to depict an ending the way it was, I would have probably thought "wow, innovative". The more I think about it the ending borrows a lot from "Wings of Desire", it has a very similar feel to it. I love "Wings of Desire". It is so melodramatic and pretentious and beautiful, and there was nothing I'd ever seen like it before (not a requirement but always rewarding) because of the post modern humor mixed with genuine sadness of the characters. I think part of the reason is that the angels are kind of made fun of as the film obviously uses typical archetypes and iconography. In the case of TOL, that ending is shot with very similar typical devices used in surreal and romantic art cinema. The main difference is that Malick shoots it honestly, there is no nod to something that is cliche or typical. He's trying to pass it off serious and it's so heavy handed because of this. I'm not saying he should make it post modern, rather if you're going to make it serious then don't rely on staples; the rest of the film didn't, why choose to now? The big ol' puffy cloud reference i used in previous points is another example of the self aware style that films like "Wings of Desire" have. Usually when god meets the person on this cliched heaven location, it'll be someone like Warren Beatty or Chris Rock. And they'll talk even more vernacular that the star of the movie; and that's the joke.

I've seen TOL's ending so many times, especially in short films, that i can't bring myself to take it seriously and therefore i'm pulled out of the film. Sadly Malick doesn't see it my way.