Part of Terrence Malick and the Nature of Cinema (Directrospective #09).

“[The form] is designed to discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them: to induce a certain tranquility in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of the film...such distancing is a source of great emotional power. Ultimately, the greatest source of emotional power in art lies not in any particular subject-matter...It lies in form. The detachment and retarding of emotions, through the consciousness of form, makes them far stronger and more intense in the end.”

—Susan Sontag, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson”

Louise: “How did you get here?” Johnny: “Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill ‘till Doomsday.”

—“Naked” (1993)

Until you’ve actually seen “The Tree of Life” for yourself, David Denby’s assertion in the pages of the New Yorker that it is an “insufferable masterpiece”—that it is, in his words, “interminable, madly repetitive, vague, humorless, grandiose”—might sound like flippant slighting. But to experience Terrence Malick’s latest and, by a considerable margin, best feature film to date, is to realize that it does in fact openly and even often stubbornly bear those qualities. Denby quickly adds that it is also “one of the great lyric achievements of the screen in recent years and a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema,” and it is certainly that; though I might suggest instead that its greatness is not achieved in spite of its conventional failings, but rather largely because of them—indeed, its conspicuous missteps are central to its success. Because “The Tree of Life” is above all else uncompromising, both as a personal statement and a formal experiment, and that refusal to compromise precludes any kind of ordinary perfection. Its commitment to seeing its ideas through, however daunting their scope, makes its particular genius special, something extraordinary to be not only commended but wholly relished, reveled in, savored.

There are precedents for “The Tree of Life's” formal innovations to be found in each of Malick’s earlier films, and there’s a distinctive persistence of vision uniting his oeuvre that extends to his latest. With every new film he produces, the qualities most clearly identifiable as Malick’s directorial signatures—his tendency to digress or meander, a deliberate disconnect between the aural and the visual, the spectacle of nature as punctuation—are increasingly amplified and exaggerated, while the traditional forms and conventions of Hollywood continue to be abandoned more and more audaciously. The distancing effect Sontag speaks of in Bresson’s work—the Brechtian tropes cherished by cinema’s traditional iconoclasts—have only slowly, and quite unselfconsciously, bloomed in Malick’s later films, a perhaps unintended consequence of what in at least his last two films can be considered outright abstraction.

This isn’t to say Malick’s films conspicuously acknowledge their own artifice, and that their distancing effects are neither staunchly intellectual nor coldly intellectual. But the form of “The Tree of Life” does, as Sontag says of Bresson’s, “discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them.” That is indeed where its emotional power and cinematic greatness lie: it’s in the ease with which Malick glides from the micro to the macro, from the miracles and tragedies of the personal to the miracles and tragedies of the universal—and, crucially, the dedication he shows to drawing these connections seriously and honestly—that one finds a work of art which is unafraid to be about both you specifically and everything universally, that is relatable because we’re alive and because others are not, and that is great like nothing before it.

What I and many others perceive in this film as greatness, though, can so easily be ridiculed by its detractors, and Malick’s straight-faced earnestness in the face of Big Questions turns out to be the film’s most salient quality for both camps. It’s no secret by now that “The Tree of Life” diverts, rather jarringly, from its humble beginnings in Texan suburbia—where we’re rapidly acquainted, through a prism of memory incited by tragedy, to Brad Pitt’s smoldering Mr. O’Brien, failed piano prodigy and domineering family patriarch, and the doomed nuclear family over which he presides—to a considerably more exalted sequence sketching the beginnings of the universe. What I admire the most about these scenes, beyond their superficial beauty, is simply the audacity required for such an ostensibly outlandish idea to be seen all the way through. I believe a less confident filmmaker would have protracted these scenes, or perhaps excised them entirely, for fear of ridicule—it’s much easier to shield your drama with ironic posturing than it is to make a serious, honest statement. But Malick’s profoundly serious approach invites a kind of quiet reverence for what’s unfolding before us—and I think, if out of respect for this commitment as much as the pure power of the images, that the sequence demands exactly the awe he’s hoping for.

To the incredulous or overly cynical, though, laughter seems the appropriate action—as evidenced by the exaggerated guffaws heard throughout the packed screening I attended. However this laughter says more about an audience’s refusal to take honest, meaningful work seriously than it does the quality of the material before them. And, to recycle an argument I made repeatedly upon the release of Godard's “Film Socialisme”—another of the year’s serious, audacious masterpieces—the oft-repeated claim by detractors that “The Tree of Life's” universal aspirations are “pretentious” is, as I see it, a kind of defense mechanism triggered by its combination of excessive ambition and personal earnestness, as though simply trying were synonymous with failing. But compared to the “Transformers 3s” of the world, films so insufficiently ambitious that they could never be mistaken for efforts of pretentiousness, I’ll gladly take a film which expects meteors and dinosaurs to resonate.

Review by:
Calum Marsh