Terrence Malick was an early love of mine. There was a time when I called him my favorite director. I used to boast that his two movies (at the time: Badlands and Days of Heaven) did more than what some filmmakers tried to do with decades worth of work. Plus he was an eccentric loner, a philosopher, the lyric poet of filmmakers. He was the American transcendentalist movie maker.
There’s something about Malick’s lyricism, the ambiguous thrust of his cinematic poetry that appeals to emotional adolescence. His movies cull meanings from imagery that ebbs and flows with seductive power, lulling us into believing — if not quite apprehending — its apparent weightiness. I once had a dinner table argument with my future father-in-law about Malick’s films and, subsequently, the idea of poetic filmmaking. The medium is wedded to time, he argued, therefore it is at its essence a narrative, not a lyric art form. I bit my tongue. I was still only dating his daughter. I thought he was wrong. If movies were theater and not poetry, then how could I be so in love with them?
I was wrong, and I have since sat through enough film festival circuit films that strive for Malick’s particular brand of lyrical filmmaking to recognize that as good as the director may be, he has inspired a trove of awful movies. “Movies are truth at 24 frames-per-second,” Jean Luc Goddard famously declared. And while exactly what the French filmmaker meant by “truth” is up for debate, the key here is the 24 frames-per-second part. Filmmaking is rooted in the image experienced in time.
In his latest film, The Tree of Life, Terence Malick once again works up a string of images, a mixture of story and textures, drama and dreams, to approach his subject with the imaginative cognizance of poetry. The film works through its images, fleeting visages that appear and disappear, that resonate and play off each other through juxtaposition, that seek to root their meaning not on the screen but in the recesses of our imagination, catching us in the rising tide of the filmmaker’s visual barrage. The Tree of Life is a work of oceanic scale and ambition, taking as its subjects not only life itself, but also the origins of nature, the foundations of the universe, the weight of time, and placing in its heart a story of death and generation. It is, as I jokingly responded when asked about this movie (which won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes), a movie about everything.
It is also Malick’s best film to date.
Given the sharply divided critical reaction that has surrounded The Tree of Life since its debut at Cannes, I feel like I need to add an important caveat here. The Tree of Life is Malick’s best film, possible one of the best films of the year, if not the decade. But it is not a movie. It seems a pretentious distinction, and one that I usually don’t make. But The Tree of Life is not a drama, it is not a narrative, it is not a movie in so far that it tells a story. It is a visual experience that would feel more comfortable in an exhibition of video art, in a context in which viewers aren’t looking for things we normally look for in movies. Some people who have seen The Tree of Life are angered by it. One local critic announced it was “pretentious with a capital ‘P.’” Of course it is. It is indulgent, obscure, oblique, and impenetrable. It is insufferably pretentious if you expect a movie from Malick, but Malick doesn’t make movies. Rather, he is always trying to push the visual medium of moving images somewhere else.
A summary of the film’s “plot” could make The Tree of Life sound like a movie. In it there is a story of a family in Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. The father (Brad Pitt) is a hardworking, hard-edged man. His sons and his wife are slightly afraid of him, and he casts a shadow over the house. We watch the boys fight and play, lose themselves in boyish mischief, and withstand the pressures and pains of young life. What persists through this vignette is a deep, trembling mood that bulldozes heaps of melancholy onto the surface of Malick’s entire picture. We learn in The Tree of Life’s opening scenes that this family has lost their son, and the story, as well as the visual acrobatics — the meditative lingering shots of everything from the interior of Philip Johnson’s chapel at Dallas’ Thanksgiving Square to the bubbling, boiling surface of the sun — is meant to provoke a reflection on the meaning of a death in the context of an unfathomable universe. What is the purpose of prayer? The hope for God? The nature of time? The value of a single, tiny soul? Malick is fueled by his own hope that answers to these questions are contained in the very images the director uses to raise them.
And here is the great frustration of Malick’s fear and trembling style of filmmaking. Living away from the world all these years seems to have afforded the recluse director with the great luxury of freeing himself from addressing or adhering to contemporary polemics. He hardly feels the urge to justify an inquiry into the nature of prayer. He hardly seems worried that his film neither starts nor ends, neither fully raises or answers any questions, has no regard for politics or clear-cut storytelling, and is about a love that is philosophical and not romantic. He hardly seems to care at all if anyone will go to his movie and actually like it. To “like” a film is, to Malick, to miss the point. The point of art is to provoke wonder, and through that wonder, approach an apprehension of the most mysterious aspects of our existence.
The Tree of Life requires its audience to be vulnerable. It asks that we not get bogged down by details and logic. We should not be distracted by trying to work out its timeline, its often strange, dream-like settings, or its presentation of a story that is as much an idea of a story as it is an actual story. This is not a puzzle that needs to be decoded. Instead, we are asked to allow ourselves to be affected by this film’s visual music. Forget you are in a movie theater and allow yourself to hear this work like it is a symphony. Realize that its form and structure is in itself a kind of test — a question Malick raises about the state of art’s audience. Has the YouTube-Facebook world thoroughly reduced us to a debased state of literality, or are our souls still fragile and vulnerable enough to allow beauty to provoke us into a profound sense of wonderment?
