Sunday, July 17, 2011

The Tree of Life
It was with great anticipation that I saw this latest of Malick’s “renewed” cinema based on how moved I was by the trailer I had watched a couple of times. Unfortunately, as is too often the case, the film itself didn’t measure up to the teaser. Like it’s two predecessors, The Thin Red Line and The New World, The Tree of Life is visually exquisite. Every shot is pretty much perfect. The camera is always in the right place, Malick shows us just the right things, the color and movement, and close-ups are perfectly accomplished as is the chaos of the beginnings of life. However, they provide an intimacy that only hints at actual characterization, and even the slim characterizations are undermined by the intrusive and clumsy voice-overs that Malick has become so enamored of. The two narrative streams, the foundations and origins of biological life, and the specific evolutionary iterations of that life presented in the O’Brien family, and even more specifically in the life of the oldest son, Jack, are not integrated. We are left expecting some confluence that remains unaccomplished. And even the narrative stream of the family is fragmented. Initially, it seems that we are inside Jack’s adult mind as he remembers the struggles of his coming of age. This is brilliantly accomplished, each scene of his youth has the feel and duration of a personal memory. But this stream devolves into a linear narrative that is too specific, detailed, and sequential to represent memory. And as this arc unfolds, I found myself disliking the characters, perhaps because we still have only stubs of them. Then there is Jack’s vision of the afterlife, that in and of itself, like the other narrative fragments, is individually very well accomplished, but which remains unconnected to either of the main, and themselves unconnected, narrative streams. The Tree of Life exemplifies what is great and disappointing in all three of these recent Malick films: stunningly, even profoundly beautiful scenes adrift without a narrative structure that even approximates their quality. I think Days of Heaven remains his best film, though the visual beauty of the three more recent films is staggering. And, even a deeply flawed film by Malick, which The Tree of Life is, stands far above most contemporary films. ***

No comments:

Post a Comment