As a welcomed break from all films blockbuster and lackluster, Lydia and I went to see The Tree of Life. Bizarrely, this is the second mention of yggdrasil in theaters as Thor deftly renders physics unnecessary with some folksy, religious descriptions about how all things are literally connected by the branches of the tree of life. Little did we know that Kenneth Branagh and Terrence Malick were making the same film using different source materials.I'll only make one more reference to Thor before moving on to spend what could be possibly days talking about The Tree of Life and my desire to make a top ten list of Malick's films (he only has six to his credit if you don't count his student work). The stuff that Thor is made of is really quite simple. It's the comic book and Doris Day and Rock Hudson films. Everyone smiles, everything works out in the end, and it's all because of their plucky outlook on life.
For Malick I think there are two primary sources that feed into the creation of his film. The first one is Gustav Klimt's Tree of Life, which I think speaks to the film's sense of all things being connected. What is a joke in Adaptation about where to begin a story, for Malick is the big revelation about the interconnectedness of all things. Klimt's painting is perhaps the film zoomed out to capture everything in a single frame. As we zoom forward we perceive individual moments part of the larger whole. Malick conversely focuses on the branches (no, there will be no puns about forest for trees, etc.), and rarely gives us any clue that what we are seeing (until the end) is all part of something much larger. The sun, water, grass, dinosaurs, bb guns, and death are all connected and are all a part of some thing. In some reviews I think this is being misconstrued as an argument for religion and the existence of God, but Malick is more complex than that. This leads me to my second source.
The search for God is here more a search for the narrative of existence and our desire to put some order on all of the things that have happened. After all this isn't a story about the development from nothingness to man, but from nothingness to the death of a man. In this way I think Malick is borrowing heavily from the ideas and aesthetics (less heavily) of Andrei Tarkovsky, specifically Solaris (not Solaris or Sunshine). The camera pauses for long periods to study the movement of water, nebulas, and snakes which leaves you awestruck with the beauty of it all. For both directors, the point seems to be not to focus on the why and how, but on the is. Life is full of wonder, beauty, chaos and pain, but this is enough. We don't need to find out what lies beneath because the majesty of it all is on the surface. I think this also speaks to the voice-overs which are at times redundant, obvious, or incoherent. Ultimately, the attempts by the characters to provide some sort of insight don't actually provide anything. And with that, I will stop my insight and leave you be.
7 comments:
Nice connections. Thor was a bad movie! (It is also about a troubled relationship between two brothers and their overbearing father.)
I have a couple of questions. First of all, Sunshine and Solaris are two different movies? I'm so confused. They have the same title, basically. And they are about space or something?
I think the point you make about constructing or imposing a story on the universe is the key to my experience of the movie. Like, if you want to explain the violence inside yourself, you naturally have to go back to your father, but that's not going to be enough. You can also follow that causal string back further, to the dinosaurs, and eventually to the beginning of the universe. And still, you won't have an explanation.
I think I see what he was trying to do with the whispered voice stuff, and I like the idea--these nearly anonymous prayers sent out into a beautiful but indifferent vacuum--but as a viewer, I still found them mostly distracting. I sort of think I might have liked them as text. But I bet I would actually have said the same things: "What was the point of those...they just explained things we already knew." But the thing is, this movie does NOT give a crap about what/whether you or I understand. Those whispered fragments aren't meant to explain things to me--anyone who wanted to explain things would have made a very different movie. They are actually prayers. I like that.
Mostly, I feel like this movie was someone else's diary that I wasn't supposed to read. Like I snuck into Mr. Malick's house while he was out one afternoon and rifled through all his dresser drawers.
One final thing, in this extremely long comment: Dave's mom has a friend who is a professional storyteller, who reportedly HATED the movie. That doesn't surprise me. I can see how a person who makes her living out of her love of a story would be unenthusiastic about a movie that so flies in the face of "story."
Normally voice-over narratives make me want to pull out my beard hair, and I don't want to suggest that they work in Malick's film. I do like the "innovative" way he uses them. They don't explain the plot or make up for something he failed to achieve in the cinematic aspect of the film. So I guess that's better than the way it works in most films.
I'm a little concerned about the title of "professional storyteller." Isn't that what Malick is? I mean, the story is just absurdly more complex than a traditional line narrative that goes through the typical three steps of beginning, middle and end. Actually, this has a clearly established beginning, middle and end, but if you'll allow me to flex my literary muscles, the problem is with the fabula and the syuzhet. The syuzhet is well out of order and perhaps that is what bothers the storyteller. Or perhaps that this story, encompasses and allows for all of the other stories to be just the one story.
Um...this is AMERICA? I don't understand your fancy communist literary theory.
When I said she's a "professional storyteller" I think I'm using a sort of term of art. Of course T Malick is a professional story teller, in the sense that he tells stories and they pay him for it. So are you. You could even make a case that I am, to the degree that my job involves writing reports and documentation. Those are kinds of stories too. But the thing I'm talking about is people who make their living traveling to festivals and libraries and schools, performing/telling stories from memory, who call themselves "storytellers" or "tellers." Their stories are mostly aimed at children I think--or at least, designed to be understood by children. So, yeah, maybe they want their syuzhets to be all lined up with their fabulas. Or something?
I'm not sure I agree that the movie has a "clear beginning, middle, and end." I think it has those things, but it keeps changing its mind about them. It's like, "let's start with my childhood. No, wait, that's not going to work. let's start with the beginning of time, and end with a bunch of strangers wandering around an afterlife beach. Or maybe the end is back with grown-up still-alive Jack, staring at a bridge. Yeah, that's it."
Perhaps it's not entirely clear, but we could go back through the film and point to moments and define to some degree their chronology (formation of earth, dinosaurs, birth of first child, birth of second child, death of child x, time of life after death of child, Sean Penn as child y who survives). And I think professional storytellers of the oral tradition do this all the time. In a lot of epic narratives time is sort of loose and fast. If a character gets introduced, we might go back in time to talk of of her childhood, and then flash forward to the present.
I guess in this way, Malick's narrative is more poetic instead of prosaic, and I can completely understand why a person who works in prose would find the film so frustrating. However, I fear I'm bypassing Russian formalism and heading straight to French Constructivism and truly abandoning my American roots.
I am hoping my silence here could count as me walking out on the film reviews. Get it? Get it????
I feel like I can't weigh in until I've seen the movie, but you two have made me want to, so well done you. In the meantime, read this CFP if you really want too hate Tree of Life, and also life:
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/41854
Or, possibly, if you want to laugh at calls for papers, which is sometimes a necessary thing. Highlight:
"How does the use of abstraction, such as the volcanoes, dinosaurs, or the heavenly develop overarching motifs to Tree of Life?"
"In the meantime, read this CFP if you really want to hate Tree of Life, and also life..."
...and also trees.
"Malickian" sounds like something...a heresy? A race of people Gulliver would have met?
Last note on Tree of Life: the further I get from it, the more I think I like it. Maybe just because I am swayed by the opinions of people I talk to.
I think the word "Malickian" could also find a happy home in any of a of fantasy series, or possibly as a character in a Children of the Corn remake.
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