Tree of Life (15.)
Directed by Terence Malick.
Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Fiona Shaw. 139 mins.
The latest from one of cinema’s most elusive and enigmatic figures is must-see film that you shouldn’t get your hopes up for. You’ve got to see it, but be prepared for an intense dose of wonderment and frustration.
Having managed to operate a four decade long career in showbusiness on just that one photograph (bearded and behatted in the seventies) Malick ranks up there with Pynchon and Salinger in the reclusive genius stakes. And to be honest you’d need to have cloaked yourself an elusive, never give interviews, only make five movies in 38 years, shroud of genius to pull a stunt like Tree of Life.
Malick makes films that look like they come from the head of a dreamy schoolchild who can’t focus in class. Even during the World War Two battle scenes in Thin Red Line his attention would wander off to look at an interesting bit of shrubbery, a passing bird. What fans see as a profound spiritual expression of the universal life force that courses equally through all organic matter in the universe, may just be the product of short attention span.”
Tree of Life is all distraction. Having failed to get properly through a whole story since his debut, Badlands, he gives up here and floats through a drifting, freeform reverie on growing up in 1950’s Waco Texas which passes before your eyes like a string of memories. Pitt is particularly good as the distant, bitter, loving father matched up against Jack (McCracken), the defiant eldest child.
Early on Malick throws in a sequence about the creation of the universe and the start of life on earth. It is staggeringly beautiful, like an updating of the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Douglas Turnbull, the visual effects master behind Blade Runner, Close Encounters and Silent Running, was drafted in to help and watching these scenes is to be reminded what special effects really mean. It’s true artistry not like the bish bosh bash, application of CGI that we have become accustomed to.
So how does this sequence relate to growing up in the 50s? Well, if at all it is in the most banal and obvious way possible – to give it perspective. Malick often strikes me as a Chancey Gardiner figure, the simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There who, after stumbling into Washington political circles, finds his gardening tip are taken as gnomic pearls of wisdom. For all his enigmatic artistry he really is stating the obvious, but in the grandest way possible. It is like kumbaya rearranged by Bach.
Directed by Terence Malick.
Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Fiona Shaw. 139 mins.
The latest from one of cinema’s most elusive and enigmatic figures is must-see film that you shouldn’t get your hopes up for. You’ve got to see it, but be prepared for an intense dose of wonderment and frustration.
Having managed to operate a four decade long career in showbusiness on just that one photograph (bearded and behatted in the seventies) Malick ranks up there with Pynchon and Salinger in the reclusive genius stakes. And to be honest you’d need to have cloaked yourself an elusive, never give interviews, only make five movies in 38 years, shroud of genius to pull a stunt like Tree of Life.
Malick makes films that look like they come from the head of a dreamy schoolchild who can’t focus in class. Even during the World War Two battle scenes in Thin Red Line his attention would wander off to look at an interesting bit of shrubbery, a passing bird. What fans see as a profound spiritual expression of the universal life force that courses equally through all organic matter in the universe, may just be the product of short attention span.”
Tree of Life is all distraction. Having failed to get properly through a whole story since his debut, Badlands, he gives up here and floats through a drifting, freeform reverie on growing up in 1950’s Waco Texas which passes before your eyes like a string of memories. Pitt is particularly good as the distant, bitter, loving father matched up against Jack (McCracken), the defiant eldest child.
Early on Malick throws in a sequence about the creation of the universe and the start of life on earth. It is staggeringly beautiful, like an updating of the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Douglas Turnbull, the visual effects master behind Blade Runner, Close Encounters and Silent Running, was drafted in to help and watching these scenes is to be reminded what special effects really mean. It’s true artistry not like the bish bosh bash, application of CGI that we have become accustomed to.
So how does this sequence relate to growing up in the 50s? Well, if at all it is in the most banal and obvious way possible – to give it perspective. Malick often strikes me as a Chancey Gardiner figure, the simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There who, after stumbling into Washington political circles, finds his gardening tip are taken as gnomic pearls of wisdom. For all his enigmatic artistry he really is stating the obvious, but in the grandest way possible. It is like kumbaya rearranged by Bach.
