I saw Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" after work today. As ever, Malick's style of moviemaking lends itself to parody, while at the same time being full of memorable, evocative images. His montage-with-voiceover and assorted juxtapositions of images show a love of the power of film to move an audience with arresting images, his narrative is, as ever, elusive. There is a story at the heart of the movie, but Malick indulges his jones for memorable angles and images and his non-linear style of filmcraft makes it an elliptical exercise. Only a director/producer/writer of his stature can get away with being able to make a movie the way he does. Malick is a kind of visual poet--he weaves poetry in his imagery, but like poets that I know (and I've known my share), he is also pretentious, and that comes through, despite the enormity and epic nature of the film. There is a strong strand of humanity in the work that binds it like glue, the sense of frailty and limitation of human mortality and the tininess of our lives in the grand and cosmic scheme of things (and, to his credit, Malick actually manages both minute focus and literally interstellar gaze with similar ease). But I felt like a lot of the epic posturing in it would have been done away with and that the movie was strongest when it was focused on the O'Brien family. Faced with so much grandiosity, the brain longs for some temporal touchstones, and the family at the center of it, the authoritarian failure of a man played by Brad Pitt, his long-suffering but ultimately emotionally accessible wife, and their three boys, one of whom dies (I am presuming in Vietnam, judging from the time period of the movie, and that the boy was 19 when he died -- although the manner of the delivery of this message doesn't fit with a military death, the timing would certainly be right). The loss of the brother is keenly felt, without being mawkish or sentimental -- despite the Baby Boomer touchpoints of this 50s family in the South, there is authentic emotion run through the piece, and the sweet sensitivity of the lost son, who is an artist/musician (or a nascent one -- he's mostly a ghost in the memory of Sean Penn's character, grown-up Jack), there is just pain riven throughout his presence that, as a father, couldn't help but move me. Without seeing his fate (except to know that he died), you feel very strongly the sense of loss through his big brother's eyes, and in the eyes of the parents (even though Pitt's character is a conflicted shit, with retrograde notions of patriarchal propriety coupled with genuine love for his sons). Leaving the movie, having been dunked in Malick's directorial vision once again, absolutely everything around me resonated visually, from ripples in the lake water catching a pinkish glow from a setting sun, to the skyscrapers, to the beachgoers, and the traffic. Everything. Malick's power as a filmmaker (if not as a storyteller) is that great that it hits you that way.
I'm glad I saw it on the big screen, although it's hard to say if I liked it, exactly. It's a movie, and it moved me, for sure, but whether that movement was wrought by the content of the film or Malick's adroit use of imagery, I can't exactly say. I certainly won't forget it, even as I feel like Malick can all too easily be parodied as a moviemaker, his signature style is ripe for parody. Unlike, say, "The Thin Red Line," which is, itself, not necessarily an easy movie to watch, I think "The Tree of Life" is a movie that I enjoyed, but don't necessarily feel the need to see again. My chest is tight at the thought of doing so, and that makes me wonder if Malick succeeded in his endeavor, to prompt such an emotional response in me, that spirit of the sublime. Malick definitely knows how to make movies that are works of art, and this one qualifies in that regard, even though the journey it takes you on is a harrowing one, leaving you emotionally spent -- it's a journey that is not for the faint of heart, nor the heartless.
