If ever a director was gifted the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it was the reclusive American auteur Terrence Malick this year for The Tree of Life. Malick has only completed five feature films in 38 years, with a 20-year gap between two of them, 1978’s Days of Heaven and 1998’s The Thin Red Line. In the interim, he diverted his career to academia.
Malick’s films are known for their prominence of imagery over action, mood over narrative. By many accounts – in particular Bill Pullman’s on The Thin Red Line, in which he was cast as a voiceover for a character who didn’t appear on screen, then dropped – he is also indecisive.
No surprise then he is treated as a maverick by Hollywood and embraced by Europe. Filmed in 2009, Tree of Life was invited to Cannes in 2010 but was not ready.
The producers waited a year and Malick hired a team of five editors to, as it were “bring it to market”. The film arrived. It baffled.It won. What he gives us is a movie that is unlike any of its contemporary American counterparts. It has Sean Penn, dinosaurs, the birth of the universe, a child emerging from a house that is sinking under water, a floating mother figure, the afterlife and what looks like the canyon where Aron Ralston was stuck for 127 Hours.
Ostensibly, as Jessica Chastain’s voiceover tells us, it is about two paths that people can take –“the way of nature and the way of grace”. Nature, Jessica tells us, seeks to glorify itself, is self-regarding. It is illustrated by one dinosaur lizard stomping on another dinosaur lizard’s head. Grace is something that is discovered, rather like the movie itself by its maker who appeared not to have much of a script or clarity of vision. It is self-sacrificing; it seeks to elevate others.
What Malick presents is grace as enlightenment, the result of transcendental meditation, hence the image of Jessica floating in a white dress by a tree.The film does not so much tell a story as flow. It begins with Sean Penn, who makes the most fleeting of appearances, muttering: “Mother, brother, you brought me to him”. The “him” we assume is God.
Penn’s unnamed character – no one in the movie is called by their name – is a middle-aged man who reflects on the death of his brother in combat. His guitar-playing younger sibling, seen only in what we might call an extended flashback growing up in the 1950s Waco, sacrificed his life just as much as his mother (Chastain) did. Penn’s character, played as a boy by Hunter McCracken, was a troubled lad, a mirror image of the inner anger experienced by his father (Brad Pitt).
Pitt is the dominant presence in the film, but he’s no monster. His anger is a manifestation of dissatisfaction with his life. He wanted to be a musician, but ended up in a suit and tie. He has a love of classical music and plays the church organ on Sundays, but seethes at injustice, looking at his neighbour’s houses with envy or contempt. He is irritated by the loud slamming of a door and makes his eldest boy close it quietly 50 times. He complains about the lawn and asks the boy to pull up weeds. He tells the middle child that if he doesn’t have anything important to say, he is not to speak for half an hour. After a long pause, the boy cries: “Shut up” and pandemonium breaks out.
The eldest boy’s anger manifests itself in breaking windows and participating in the rocket launch of a live frog. The drama stops when Pitt relates how they have to move. “I have to lose my job or take a job no one wants”. Then there is an extensive reconciliation in another world, Penn having attained a state of grace, forgiveness, whatever.The Tree of Life engages the eye with its vivid low-camera angles and tracking shots over hard interiors. It stimulates the mind. It does not touch the emotions. There are few conversations. Characters make statements that are heard by others but not responded to. Pitt complains about his life, but the eldest boy says nothing.
Malick is mirroring the one-way conversation that folks have with their deities. They do all the praying, but God is silent. But there is a sense that The Tree of Life aims to present an alternate way of looking at the world and of forgiving others.If you ever have wondered whether there is a difference between movie dialogue and theatrical speech, then Jack Goes Boating, adapted by Bob Glaudini from his 2005 play and directed by and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, will give you the answer.
Movie dialogue essentially advances the plot, with characters explaining what they intend to do. Theatrical speech – at least the kind adopted by Glaudini in his New York City-set comedy-drama – involves characters talking into the air, unburdening themselves, with less apparent regard for what the consequences are or how they are perceived. Early on, Connie (Amy Ryan) explains how, when her father was in a coma, she explained to him how he could “let go” (of life). Then, surprisingly, her father recovered, but on his way to Connie’s mother, also receiving medical attention, he tripped and died. Connie’s audience – loner limousine driver Jack (Hoffman), his fellow chauffeur and best buddy Clyde (John Ortiz) and Clyde’s wife Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) – don’t know how to respond.
The play-cum-film is about groping towards some distraction from the messiness of existence. In short, it’s an archetypal American indie movie.Jack may have his name in the title, but he is essentially a catalyst, and not a particularly credible one. He listens to “Rivers of Babylon” on an old-fashioned Walkman and has his hair in braids hidden under a woolly hat. He lives with his uncle and cannot cook or swim.
Connie has problems expressing herself. She is not settling into her job selling seminars for Dr Bob (Thomas McCarthy).We learn little about her, other than she is a magnet for misfortune. She has a particularly awkward encounter with a male subway passenger who, off-screen, assaults her. In spite of this and knowing she faces the sack, she carries on with a telephone call at work. This is the kind of drama where a character turns up in hospital with a toy koala bear that expresses his difficulty to connect. Clyde teaches Jack to swim so he can take Connie boating – a gesture that is entirely symbolic of delayed gratification, since the film starts in the middle of a New York winter. Clyde explains to Jack that he loves him. Typical of the film, Jack does not perceive this as a crisis of masculinity. Clyde also – somewhat improbably – enrols his wife’s ex-lover “the Cannoli” (Salvatore Inzerillo) to teach Jack how to cook. The film builds to a disastrous dinner party, in which a prop becomes a terrific comic punch line.
Only two characters, Clyde and Lucy, are sufficiently rounded. I did not believe in Jack and Connie, especially Connie’s speech to Jack that: “You can take me, but not overwhelm me”. You can see the gesture it provokes working on stage. On film, it comes across as an improbable gag. To be sure, there are some laughs to be had in Jack Goes Boating and a few shocks, but I did not find the optimistic ending credible.
