Since releasing Badlands almost
forty years ago, Malick has become one of the most respected and critically
adored filmmakers of all time, which is impressive considering that in the
entirety of the last four decades he's only made about five fucking films. In
half that time alone, Michael Bay has produced enough shite to fill an entire
cathedral with bollocks movies. Until recently, the only two Malick films that
I'd seen were Badlands and The Thin Red Line and I was obviously
a huge fan of both. They were meditations on the nature of humanity and both
were shot with a poetic love for life. The Thin Red Line has a huge cast
consisting of cinema’s most famous faces and yet it’s shots of leaves and
crocodile shit that Malick decides to focus on the most.
The latest of his films to be released is The
Tree of Life which, despite being heckled at Cannes, managed to end up
winning the 2011 Palme D'or. I know a film being booed is usually considered a
bad thing but when it's coming from the French, I'll generally make an absolute
effort to love it. With this in mind I finally got around to watching it the
other night and was absolutely blown away. How the French can boo what is
obviously a masterpiece is completely beyond me. First they surrendered Paris
to the Nazi's and now this. It's just one stupid mistake after another with them,
isn't it.
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| Jeff Spicoli: Earth's Mightiest Hero |
It's hard to kind of describe the plot of The
Tree of Life, but I'll have a go anyway. So- for some reason it starts with
Sean Penn walking around aimlessly in a modern day city. I'm not sure what he's
doing there but I don't think it really matters. It's Sean Penn, so he's probably
just roaming the Earth, looking for some political injustice to get angry
about. When the world is controlled by shadowy Corporations and corrupt
Governments, it honestly makes me feel so much safer to know that we're being
protected by an ageing Jeff Spicoli.
The film then starts to depict Penn's birth
and childhood. He was raised in the 50's in Texas by Brad Pitt and Jessica
Chastain. He has two brothers with the family grieving over the sudden death of
their oldest son. His mother is depicted angelically as a woman who wants to
instil her children with a sense of wonder for the natural world. Brad Pitt on
the other hand has the temper of a cunt and thinks the world's going to shit.
Whilst she's outside pissing about with butterflies, he's inside teaching the
kids that society is a manipulative rapist that will sly-fuck them into the
grave. At one point, he educates his son on how to defend himself by asking him
to punch him in the face. For some reason though the child seems bizarrely
reluctant to physically assault his own Dad. As we all know though, when Brad
Pitt asks you to hit him, you do so immediately and you aim straight for his
fucking ear.
Whilst Penn's character’s childhood does
take up the bulk of the film, there's also a few other things thrown in for
good measure. Every so often, we're randomly treated to some scenes from the
creation of the Universe which, to be fair, are absolutely mesmerising.
Responsible for these shots was legendary special effects Supervisor Doug
Trumbull who had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and whose previous film
had been Blade Runner almost thirty years previous. I watched his
work on The Tree of Life and was in absolute awe of how eye-bleedingly
gorgeous everything looked. I seriously wouldn't recommend watching whilst
stoned though as you could easily lose a few hours to gawping at any single
frame of this film, though having said that, I did also once lose about fifteen
long minutes by just staring intently at a door handle. It looked so plastic
and shiny that in my stupor, I seriously couldn't believe my luck.
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| "Clever girl..." |
There's another scene thrown into this film
too which actually received a little bit of criticism. A dinosaur is lying
helpless by the side of a stream when a larger carnivore heads over to eat it.
Before the sharp tooth chows down however, he has a second thought and decides
instead to scuttle off without murdering his intended victim. If only OJ
Simpson had a similar epiphany then perhaps that murder that he 'didn't' commit
wouldn't have happened either. This is apparently supposed to represent the
birth of conscience with the meat eater feeling too guilty to kill its helpless
meal. Most critics seem to think that overall this section is just a little bit
out of place but fuck it, they're all wrong. In fact I don't think there's a
single film out there that couldn't be improved with a few extra dinosaur
scenes thrown in for good measure. Sure The Godfather is great but is a
T-Rex's head not more threatening than a horse’s? If there was a risk of a
Raptor attack in any of Katherine Heigl's movies, one of them might even be in
danger of being watchable. There's a big emphasis on the word ‘might’, there.
So as is probably obvious, The Tree of
Life doesn't have a standard and straight forward narrative. In a way, this
film actually consists of two separate halves. The first is a montage of those
above sections, highlighting the poetry of love, death and nature. There's the
beauty of the universe, the kindness of a species and the sheer joy of Penn's
youth. In fact I think this could be the most exuberant depiction of childhood
that could exist without an XBox or widescreen TV. On one of the rare occasions
that my boyhood self decided to play outside, I ended up finding cans of beer
and grotty pornography in the bushes. It was one of those ‘reader’s wife’
magazines featuring such a manky standard of fanny that I think I was genuinely
traumatised for a good few years by it. The young Penn however luckily just
plays ball games and frolics in fields with his brothers.
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| "Ah... Flash back humour." |
If it wasn't for Pitt's brooding bulk of
insecurities then everything in the boy’s life would be great. It's not that
Pitt doesn't love his kids; it's more that he wants to ensure they're hardened
to a world that's disappointed him. He'd dreamed of being a musician but ended
up being a failed business man. In fact everything that irks Pitt here was
cheerfully summed up by Pitt in 1999, “We've
all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires,
and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that
fact. And we're very, very pissed off”.
The second half of the film tones
down the collage of beauty and instead focuses a little more on the 50's
upbringing. The young Penn also starts to become angry and disillusioned by his
father after noticing the hypocrisies of what he preaches and how he acts. In
fact the film surprisingly starts heading slightly into Badlands territory
as the young boy goes a little off the rails turning slightly into Sid
from Toy Story. He starts vandalising buildings, assaulting people and
abusing animals. At one point he ties a frog to a firework and sets it off. I'd
like to say this scene ends with the frog, “falling with style”, but it
doesn't, he just explodes like a big green twat. I can't say for sure, but I
suspect this is about the point that the French audience probably started
booing.
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| Moustache, coffee stain or caterpillar? |
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| "I'm 21 and wearing nothing but nipple tassles." |
So anyway I guess I should say what The Tree
of Life is actually all about but in honesty I haven't got a fucking clue.
I mean, I can see that it's examining the meaning of life and exploring the
presence of God or divinity in nature but I'm not sure what's concluded.
However I don't think that it's a film that intends to provide any definitive
answers either. It's one of those movies with enough openness and ambiguity
that I think it will just feed back to you with whatever you go in looking for.
Kind of like having a conversation on one of those sex lines where they're
always just going to tell you what you want to hear.
Special Effects aside, this film obviously has
a lot of thematic and narrative similarities with 2001: A Space Odyssey as
both are films that look at the origins of life, the purpose of existence and
how everything links together. However, where Kubrick's film can appear cold-hearted
and pretentious, Malick's plays out like it's straight from his heart. In my
opinion, 2001 has a kind of lecturing feel whilst The Tree of Life is
more like a poetry of observations and of optimistic expressions. If Kubrick was the strict Professor shutting
the class room blinds on a sunny day then, Malick would be the soon-to-be-fired
hippy teacher dicking about in the leaves and mud outside.
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| Malick on set of latest film? |
It should probably also be pointed out just
quite how autobiographical and personal this is for Malick too. He was raised
in a similar place at a similar time and within a similar family setup. The
film contains all of his usual nuances such as whispering voice-overs, use of
natural light, a warm but smothering sense of existentialism and of course, a
couple of neglected A-List actors. Sean Penn was allegedly pissed off with the
film because his character ended up with significantly less scenes than he'd
filmed. Although I can see why he'd be annoyed, I wasn't the one who spent time
filming them, so fuck him.
The Tree of Life is
such a phenomenal and joyous movie that I genuinely think it should be shown
and discussed in schools. Teachers put plenty of effort into convincing kids to
read books but not enough into weaning them onto decent movies. It might sound
like a sit off, but encouraging children to write an essay on their perceived
philosophies of this film would probably be more beneficial than pretending to
read Macbeth for the five-hundredth time. If we taught them the joy and
truth of cinema then perhaps cunts like Michael Bay wouldn't be so rich. When I
was in school, there was a teacher who was a domestically abused, alcoholic
with a lesson plan consisting of simply handing out word searches. As much as
we used to enjoy how her horrific personal life would allow us an easy lesson,
a movie from Terrence Malick would probably
have been somewhat more educational.
Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.
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