The Tree of Life

NickClapper

NickClapper

I'm curious to know who's seen it and what they think of it.

We're a community of filmmakers and film viewers and I'm interested to see what the different perspectives are with regards to this film. I suspect it will be highly polarizing.

For my part I've never had so much difficulty knowing what to write in a review (hence the reason I have yet to write it). I'm a big Malick fan in general and I don't think I've ever seen a film as beautifully shot as The Tree of Life but at the same time I just wanted it to have a story, or at least some sort of meaning that was obvious from behind my Red Vines and Minute Maid Lemonade. The whole thing was so wonderfully strange and elliptical but also deeply unsatisfying that I felt it deserved its own thread.

Thoughts?
 
Now I haven't seen it. I have an idea of what it will be like based on his past works. Malick is a poet(or at least he tries to be). He tries to put poetry on to the screen, and it just doesn't work. I'm sure there will be a lot of long scenes where characters stare at each other and a violin plays in the back ground. Then he'll cut to a tree, for no apparent reason. Something like that.

It probably wont go to major release because it's an artsy film. It's not for your typical dumbass(american) viewer.

I want to see it simply because it's very polarized. Honestly I'll probably think of it the same way I did 'The Thin Red Line'. It was a good movie just get the fuckin poetry out of there.
 
mrbigchin said:
I want to see it simply because it's very polarized. Honestly I'll probably think of it the same way I did 'The Thin Red Line'. It was a good movie just get the fuckin poetry out of there.
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If this is what you think about Malick's other work then I suspect you'd hate The Tree of Life.

It's as though he's watched the moments of incidental beauty in his other films but here has written a script which just says 'Film pretty things...'. Honesty for a film that is 2 and 1/2 hours long I reckon there are probably about 20 pages of dialogue. And Sean Penn gets about 7 minutes of screen time.

Ernest Worthing said:
I've been wanting to see it. Limited Release. Not playing anywhere near me
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That's a shame. Whatever you think of his work he's one of the greatest living directors and his films should be seen by some sort of audience...

Flicker Pictures said:
There are some flicks I'd like to see in the theater and this is one of them.
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You best hurry up. I had to look pretty hard to find a cinema in LA still showing it... I think there are only two at the moment...
 
Zensteve wrote:

http://www.movies.com/movie-news/tre...ning-sign/3433

I dunno what to think.
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I loved this by Zachary Herrmann:

This is a film that was booed at Cannes (I'm aware this is not a rare occurrence). Not everyone is going to love every movie they walk into. Will we be getting signs for Transformers 3?: "Buyer beware. This is a film with clanking, exploding robots directed by an over-zealous man-child of a director. There will be no refunds".
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NickClapper said:
That's a shame. Whatever you think of his work he's one of the greatest living directors and his films should be seen by some sort of audience...
.
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Tell me abt it. My significant other noted down all the movies i wanted to see in the theatre on her calendar. And i was looking forward to The Tree of Life, seeing the date get nearer and nearer and then...
 
I thought it was spectacular. One of only two films I’ve seen this
year that I truly loved. To me it demonstrates the power of film.
No story to speak of but intensely moving. I was mesmerized from
start to finish.

No way would I recommend this film to too many people. I suspect
most people will not like it.
 
I loved it. I almost feel like I need to do a blog post on it.

I love Malick. The Thin Red Line is one of my favorite films. So I went in wanting to like it. I ended up liking it. I just didn't understand the 'creation' part. I didn't think it was necessary.

Funny thing is I went to see it with two 'artsy' female friends. I was sure they were going to like it as they like most films I don't understand. I was worried that I wouldn't like it. Turned out, they were both mystified as to the point of the movie.

For my part, I didn't need story. To me it was just some guy's reminiscence. I reminisced with him. I found myself identifying with the kid, even though I didn't grow up anywhere near the time or place. It was a brilliant movie. But I think it's a very guy movie.
 
mrbigchin said:
That's what I'm worried about. It seem like he's walking the fine line of artsy film and bullshit art(depressed guy smoking a cigaret).
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I think he totally crossed the line. It's artsy bullshit. But artsy
bullshit made by a master of his craft and medium. I wouldn't
want every film I see to be like this and I sure as hell wouldn't
want to see other filmmakers try to make artsy bullshit like
this. But damn! Malick can do it and do it so well I truly loved it!
I sat in that theater experiencing the power of this medium as if
for the very first time.

The only other film I have truly loved this year is "Midnight
in Paris".
 
Saw this last night, and I really enjoyed it. Refreshing to experience a story visually when so much of modern film making relies upon incessant chatting* to express emotional states and the like.

I definitely agree that I wouldn't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry to try to create work like this, but at the same time I really dislike the term "Artsy Bullshit." One may not appreciate one particular piece of work, but it's "Artsy Bullshit" like this that has historically driven the evolution of cinematic storytelling. There's plenty of stuff I would classify as "bullshit," but it's level of "artsyness" is rarely one of my criteria.

Cross cutting, jump cuts, disregard for the 'line,' stories told entirely through vignette, all of these things (and more) were "artsy bullshit" at one time or another, and yet are now incorporated in mainstream "paint by numbers" Hollywood technique. Yup, more stating the obvious, I know - but maybe we need a better term or something, I dunno. Heh.

Tree of... captures the essence of childhood memory perfectly. Not the experience of being a child, but the experience of self evaluation through shady recollections of childhood moments. Admittedly, that represents only a small part of what is going in there, and only speaks to the style of those particular scenes. Either way, that was one of the aspects of the film that really struck me. Perhaps it's an audience perspective thing. I'm curious to see it a second time for additional things I may have missed.


* - Yes, there are directors that do dialogue driven/heavy films that are quite incredible; I'm not talking about those. :D
 
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A mess.

But a glorious mess.

Fascinating to see such a smart director like Malick fall on his face like an amateur, succumbing to sophomoric symbolism and crass, Hallmark sentiment to sell his ideas. Often he resorts to a meat-fisted approach, punching you in the face with images that drip with streaming light in the exact manner of religious affirmation posters, backed with swelling choral music then seasoned with whispered dialogue, all meant to make it seem weighty, meaningful, and deep. Makes you want to slap him -- especially that stupid bloody ending in which he subjects his audience to a Mormon Church commercial, a car-wreck of maudlin cheese that physically hurts to suffer through, and is utterly condescending it its oversimplification of the Big Important Themes that Malick wrestles with and finally loses to.

He resurrects the ghost of Kubrick's "2001" for his long intro, yet with none of Kubrick's finesse or mystery, and instead just lards on galactic special effects as if it were an updated episode of "Cosmos." Yet he never successfully ties these images into the rest of the film.

The film's only female is a cartoon Virgin Mary with no personality save what lovely Jessica Chastain works hard to breathe into her.

Hunter McCracken as Young Jack is the soul of the film, and it is his scenes which stand out. The truest, best parts of the movie are his boyhood existential crises manifested via edgy moments of tweener roughhousing, or of his confused sexual questioning. These, and scenes with his brothers, or of his love-hate relationship with Brad Pitt in a believable role as his hard-assed 1950s father, are really the film's only scenes given substance enough to exist, as they have both an emotional and intellectual core -- but only comprise part of the movie.

Visually, there is as much to love as to hate, and the imagery is best when Malick is simply riffing like a cinematic jazz musician on whatever populates a given environment. But as soon as Malick fixates on Making A Big Point, beware -- all instantly becomes laughably clumsy and belabored. This film would be completely easy to parody, so overused are Malick's tiny palette of devices; the clouds, the trees, the whispering, the choir, over and over and over again but with nothing new to reveal on each new repetition.

Though I'm glad I saw it, it was never breathtaking, never transcendent in the way he tried too hard to achieve.

Malick fails this time around.
 
I went to see Tree of Life this weekend. That was the first time in years that I set foot in a movie theater. Things haven't changed that much.

I was disappointed. I blame the critics. They built up the "creation sequence" too much. I was expecting superb nature imagery like in topnotch documentaries such as BBC's "Planet Earth". The nature/space/biology/dinosaur sequence lasts about 10 mn. No big deal. The rest is random family scenes.

There was a beginning and an end, death and acceptance. So, you could say that the movie was emotionally resolved. The problem is that there was no obvious path from one to the other. The middle was like random memories.

The chronology is bit screwy. The death seems to be placed in childhood but it really happens after, if that makes any sense. Maybe Malick couldn't be bothered to put some aging makeup on his actors. One interpretation could be that the whole thing happens in Sean Penn's mind and he retrofitted the death to his childhood years because he happened to be thinking about the past. Maybe making sense of his family's history led him to acceptance.

To me the movie was a grandiose failure. I wasn't touched by grace. But maybe a grandiose failure is worth more than a formulaic success. Those I leave to Netflix.

I hope there will be a 4h director's cut that will make more sense.


PS: If anybody knows what the narrow tunnel-like attic shots were about, please enlighten me.
 
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