Critique: Malick's The Tree of Life

I finally got around to watching The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick. It has been sitting on my tv cabinet for a number of years now. In a great part it had slipped from my mind, and when it did come back to my attention every so now and then I was never in the mood for it. I generally will not watch a film for the first time if I fear my mood will get in the way. And knowing the way of Malick films, I was all the more wary. (And, to be honest, I was often put off by the idea of a Malick film centered on an abusive father.)

Now, I consider The Thin Red Line one of the greatest movies I have seen. It is for me an achievement of cinema as art. So I have a high estimation of what Malick can do, and an appreciation of his methods. Though, I was put off by To the Wonder, if simply in that the infidelity seems to occur for no reason whatsoever: it is an ungrounded moment in the film and yet the film hinges on it, so it hinges on an emptiness. At that moment the film loses its structural integrity. In truth, I was rather pissed off at it. I also have The New World, though I will have to watch it again. It has been a while.

But The Tree of Life. It is about the overtly stated question of living either in the spirit of nature (in essence, that of competition) or the spirit of grace (that of love). Its frame is a family in the 1950s, the O'Briens: father and mother (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and their three sons. It seems clear the father, who is an abusive disciplinarian who believes success only comes by conquering and strives to train his sons to that belief, stands for the spirit of nature, while the more loving mother, within whose presence the three boys are the most joyous, for the spirit of grace. And that theme of two opposites does run through the main body of the film. But the issues are more structural than thematic.

The film opens on Chastain and jumps quickly to what are presumably brief moments of her childhood on a farm. Though, if they are meant to establish a character they are too brief and shots of petting a cow does not character establish. Indeed, I thought at the fore there was a daughter in the film. It speaks that perhaps Malick was letting his impressionistic technique take the best of him. Within the first minute there is created a confusion. Then come some moments of Chastain with the boys at play – prelude to the joy of the spirit of grace. Then a scene of Chastain receiving a telegram, telling her one of her sons is dead. The time of that is some ten-odd years in the future. Though, there is nothing to cue that. On second viewing you will notice that the house is different than the house with the boys as seen in those moments of the film, but in the first viewing it is unestablished. For me it was not until the Sean Penn voiceover, he playing the character of the eldest son as an adult, where he says his brother died at the age of nineteen, that it became clear. Though, it took longer yet for me to figure out which son was dead and which son Penn was playing. Yes, on second viewing the cues are there, and I cannot say that a film has to be wholly understandable on the first viewing. The Thin Red Line has a flaw in that the two main characters have voices very close to each other. It took me the second viewing to fully distinguish them. (The error may have been in my not realizing it was two voices to begin with.) And, as has been said by more than one, literature can only be re-read. And, push comes to shove, The Thin Red Line is not an easy reader text.

Shining Books

This is a new essay added to the Cabinet, which thus can also be found here. It is a bit I have been wanting to do for a while. A little something for you Shining obsessives.

 

What I want to do here is mostly point out a curiosity I noticed with Kubrick's The Shining as regarding books. It's nothing groundbreaking; mostly a curiosity. Though, with Kubrick's well known attention to detail I think it is safe to go beyond mere curiosity: these are not accidents within the film, but designed and attended to details. How successfully you can read something out of these details is a matter of what it is you want read out of them. I myself will intend only safe steps.

For me, I think there are three such places to go. First, there is the simple issue of visual effect. Second, there is a relationship between books and the characters of the movie. Third, I believe that relationship works if but as one piece of evidence (and not a terribly important one at that) to disrupting what I believe is a false idea about the Overlook Hotel: that is, I believe most people want to read the movie as a haunted house film, that there is something inherently evil about the hotel. I do not read the movie as such: I read it that while there may be evil within the hotel (room 237 is most definitely a negatively defined place), the hotel itself is, as a whole, neutral. Yes, as Halloran says, the Overlook shines. But shining is not in itself evil. Perhaps, to use a theme not absent from The Shining, the Overlook's shine is like a mirror: you get out of it greatly what you put into it.

Review of 12 years a Slave

I posted this originally to the Poetry Daily Critique blog back in August to see the blog could handle expanding into letting film be part of the conversation, as cinema is (and for me has been) commonly a subject of study in theory. Once posted, though, it was obvious the blog could not handle the expansion. So I pulled the post off and held it until I had opened the Adversaria, here.

As with most long articles on this blog, it is also up on the Cabinet, here.

 

It should be obvious to anyone who has the films that 12 Years a Slave is, visually, heavily influenced by the style of Terrence Malick's recent work. It may, however, be but a kindness to us in that sentence the word influenced. The film nearly grunts for its effort to maintain the pacing, visuals, and general ambiance of Malick's work. It was not infrequent while watching 12 Years a Slave that I felt the want of the film to be like (or to become) The Thin Red Line.[FN] All the film needed in its visual reveries was the meditative voice-overs to complete the illusion (or transformation), which did arrive at the scene where Epps -- the primary slaveowning character of the film -- is looking over his worm infested field, a sequence that could not be more Malick and this time with the voice over, the only one in the film of which I have memory, about being visited by a plague.

******************************* [FN] It should be noted here that I have not yet seen To the Wonder, and I have only seen parts of Tree of Life. My focusing here on The Thin Red Line as stylistic source material is, however, not weakened by that want. I have watched The New World a couple of times, and it is to The Thin Red Line that 12 Years a Slave continuously pulls me. Indeed, the argument I present below does have an avenue for expansion through the shared themes of violence in the two films and how they are handled visually. *******************************

However, the dialog turns upon itself when Epps pulls away from any meditativeness and switches to the blunt, nearly non-sequitur casting of blame for the plague upon the "godless" slaves working the field. It is a statement that makes little sense within the context established thus far, which is why I found it so jarring. At the point, at that moment, the film makes it quite clear to anyone paying attention – though, in truth, if you were paying attention you recognized this far earlier, the plague sequence merely the most overt stating of the fact – that 12 Years a Slave is neither influenced by nor in creative engagement with Malick's style but merely mimicking it.