To The Wonder

Terrence Malick is the rare artist who knows exactly what he wants to say, and is able to take all of the time he needs to say it. Never one for being bound to someone else's ideas of what he should do, he's marched to the beat of his own drum almost from the get-go. Unfortunately for us, that means he's only released 6 feature films in 43 years.

So, when word got out that his next film was releasing only 1 year after 2011's The Tree of Life, one of the most stunning films of recent years (and, in the eyes of this critic, the best of that year if not of the young century), we rejoiced.

To The Wonder tells the story of 4 people. A Midwesterner (Ben Affleck) and a Parisian (Olga Kurylenko) fall in love, and their relationship turns turbulent when they move back to the United States. When they decide to spend time apart, he begins a relationship with a local woman (Rachel McAdams). All the while, the local priest (Javier Bardem), tries to serve the community while dealing with a crisis of faith.

My expectations were high, particularly given the film's two spellbinding trailers (found here and here). With his last two films, Malick's gotten to a point that his trailers would be Academy Award winning short films if they were released as such.

Unfortunately, To The Wonder suffers from a lack of narrative cohesion. I think that a lot of it has to do with Malick's reliance on voiceover. I'm a big fan of the technique when it's incorporated well, but it's used to excess here. There's very little actual dialogue present, and that hurts the film. When Affleck and Kurylenko are arguing, I'd really like to hear what they're arguing about instead of listening to ambient music and her voice speaking softly about how much he completes her.

It's frustrating, because you get to a point where you just want the characters to stop talking about what's happening and start telling you what's happening. I found myself asking a few fundamental questions that additional dialogue would have aided immensely. Why do these women fall for Affleck's character? He's moody, not terribly supportive, and even abusive. Why would anyone treat Kurylenko's character badly?  She's vivacious, sweet, and so wholly devoted to him that it boggles the mind that he wouldn't move heaven and earth to keep her near. Instead of expository dialogue, what we get is whole lot of brooding, glowering, staring, and slow turns around one another like some kind of extremely subdued flamenco.

There are certain aspects of the film that are first-rate. The photography is fantastic. If they continue their collaboration, Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki might go down as one of the all-time great director/cinematographer combos. There are individual shots here that will take one's proverbial breath away. In particular, there's one particular shot of dancing light reflected off of a chandelier that literally made me sit up and stare at the screen in wonderment.

The performances by Kurylenko and McAdams deserve praise, particularly given how thin the plot seems to be. In particular, Kurylenko's performance is extremely solid. In the absence of dialogue, her face communicates a wealth of emotion. 

I also really liked Bardem's character. In a time when Catholic priests certainly haven't been regarded in the most positive light, his character is a fundamentally good man who cares deeply about serving his community. While I liked the bits about his crisis of belief, I found myself surprised at how heavily the film comes to communicate a heavily Christian message toward the end. From what little I know of him, I believe that Malick is a Christian himself, but I found such a pointed message to be a bit of a strange choice, particularly given how universal the spiritual themes were in The Tree of Life.

Additionally, there are individual sequences that highlight Malick's abundant gifts as a filmmaker. In particular, the film's closing sequence is beautiful. It involves a woman walking, walking, walking before finally turning to see something. At that point, I felt as though I were in a place that I knew. I only wish that the rest of the film had seen that kind of cohesion.

Malick's come to a place where he's not terribly interested in conventional notions of plot and story structure. I understand (and applaud!) that. The problem arises when he doesn't leave enough bread crumbs for the viewer to be able to put the pieces together in any kind of a meaningful way. Here, as in The Tree of Life, Malick employs a kind of omnipotent perspective. While it mostly seems to move forward in one fairly consistent timeline, To The Wonder does skip around in a way that confuses things, particularly toward the end. In the face of many seemingly needless contradictions, my friend and I were abundantly confused about what the state of Affleck and Kurylenko's relationship was when the film ended. 

I certainly don't regret seeing the film, but while a film from Terrence Malick is always worth the effort, To The Wonder seems to me to be a big missed opportunity. That said, I look forward to further reading and discussion in the hope I'll be able to find further illumination.

2 1/2 stars (out of 5)

The Tree of Life, 3 Intelligent Gentlemen, and Me

A few days ago, Aaron of The Code Is Zeek and I were discussing The Tree of Life, and he invited me to be part of a round table discussion of the film on his podcast, Out Now With Aaron and Abe. Having a chance to discuss the film with Aaron and his other guests, Mark Hobin of Fast Film Reviews and Jordan Grout (of a blog whose creation is imminent), was great fun, and the conversation proved enlightening. Below, you'll find the podcast in its entirety. Beware, spoilers abound!

THE PODCAST!

The Tree of Life – Looking Through the Eyes of the Almighty

To watch The Tree of Life is to look through the eyes of god. For a being like that, time would have no meaning and even less value. To see the beginning of the universe would be of no more difficulty than to look at the life of one person or onward to the end of days. The truth of what people are feeling and thinking would become apparent, even as they express the opposite. To describe the narrative, I cannot get around the fact that the film is much more like a poem than a story. Poems use language to try to burrow inside of an emotional reality. This is not the same as the way things actually “are.” In the world you and I live in, people can’t fly, the Light Brigade is long dead, and we don’t have the chance to talk with people who have died. But in a poem, you can say anything that you need to say, and you can do it in any way that you want to.

Terrence Malick is clearly very, very sincere. This is a personal film above all else, and I mean that as a compliment. It takes courage to put one's deepest emotions out for all to see as explicitly as Malick has done. Normally, when discussions begin of cinematic bravery, they relate to an artist’s commitment to tackling material that’s widely thought of as difficult. I wonder, however, if there is any material more difficult than the honest exploration of what one truly thinks and feels about the nature of love, life, death, spirituality, and the universe itself. These are the deepest things that a person can hold within. It is so easy to laugh and poke fun at someone when he/she is being sincere, and the vulnerability with which Malick has opened himself is something that has my deepest admiration.

The Tree of Life tells the story of the lives of the O’Brien family in Waco, Texas in the 1950’s, that most misunderstood of modern American decades. Mr. & Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) have three boys and very different ideas about how to raise them. Mr. O’Brien clearly loves his family, but has no idea how to properly express it as a husband and father. He’s never done this before, and it’s heartbreakingly obvious. There are a number of times where he’s shown playing with his sons, but I think they’re already so resentful and/or scared of him that it’s too little, too late. At the same time, he’s undoubtedly a passionate person. He truly wants his children to learn the things that he felt he never did or learned too late, and his love of music is the most tangible of any of his expressions of love. While Mrs. O’Brien loves her children and is clearly their emotional center, I think they resent the fact that she lets her husband do what he wants without standing up for them. There’s only so much a person can stand of being told how much he/she is loved to his/her face without it being proved when it matters most.

While the family has five members, the narrative revolves mostly around Jack (Hunter McCracken/Sean Penn), the oldest son. His transformation is something that resonated with me. I can clearly remember the day that my internal life changed forever. Overnight, I went from being a carefree kid to an adolescent dealing with thoughts and emotions much too complicated for him. Like Jack, there was nothing I wanted more than to get back to where I’d been before, to somehow find a way to navigate myself back to the space I’d occupied where the only thing I had to worry about was whether or not I’d like what was being served for dinner. I was so desperate then. What no child ever realizes at first is that one cannot go back. There is no way to unlearn, barring illness or senility, what it is to be an adult and to have to deal with things heretofore relegated to the “grown up” and “mature.”

The Tree of Life is a study in mirrors, types, and shadows. At the outset, the family learns that their middle son is dead. It’s a devastating moment in their lives, both individually and collectively, and I don’t think it’s one that they ever fully recover from. From there, the film moves into dazzlingly abstract territory to the formation of the universe. It’s beautiful to look at, and I’ve never seen VFX used in quite this way before. Some shots are so beautiful as to appear to be footage taken by the likes of the Hubble Telescope. After the creation of the earth, the long-awaited (and til this point rumored) dinosaurs emerge. Yes, you heard right. Dinosaurs. It’s all right. Go with it. Then, the meteor strikes, and life on earth is irrevocably changed. After that, things shift to the formation of the family. We see the birth of the children, and we get a sense of the rhythm of their daily lives. The only difference is that we already know what their meteor will be. We know exactly what will change their lives forever.

So much of the film is a conversation with god. Even as Jack is saying his nightly prayers, with the obligatory “make me a good boy” and so on, we hear his heart. “Where are you? Do you see me?” One of the most significant bits for me occurred when he says “I’m not going to try and be good. You aren’t.” As the universe is being born, we hear Mrs. O’Brien asking god why it has allowed evil to befall those who try to be righteous. That most ancient of questions. A preoccupation of some of the surviving members of the family is speaking with their deceased son/brother, and there’s an interesting malleability of names and subjects at work here. At times, it’s unclear if who’s being addressed is the dead boy or god itself.

The way that Terrence Malick and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, have shot the film is dazzling, even virtuosic. The camera (and, by extension, the film’s rhythm at times) is so fluid as to seem to be alive. It flies, swoops and swirls like a force of nature all its own. There are a half-dozen directors I’d like to make study Malick’s work here to learn how to create a sense of motion without cutting every 2 seconds. There are some gorgeous shots that make better use of a crane than just about anyone I’ve seen. The camera glides down hallways, often turning to look at the scenery with a mind all its own. But motion, endless motion, is what Malick seems to be striving for here.

It didn’t strike me until a little bit after the film was over, but the “dramatic” climax of the film occurs so early in the film as to sneak right past the viewer. It’s a few words spoken over the phone in an elevator that become a brief moment of connection in an attempt to rectify the past. It’s a rare moment of near-irony in a piece that exists almost completely in the absence of insincerity.

In The Tree of Life, fantasy and reality collide, the past, present, and future are interchangeable, and the inner lives of a few common people are expanded in bright, bold relief. Ultimately, Terrence Malick is using the lives of one family in Waco, Texas as a microcosm of the life and death of the universe itself. I know that it sounds incredibly pretentious to put it like that, but it’s true. People are born and they die, often for no discernable reason. What’s left is for the living to go on, treasuring the memories they have, picking up the pieces that are left, and making the most of every precious fragment that remains.

One of 2011's best films.

4 1/2 stars (out of 5)