Just saw this film last night and am rather surprised there’s no thread about it yet.
My wife and I found it intriguing and thought-provoking, but we were puzzled by much of it, particularly the explicit references to the biblical story of Job, which don’t really seem to tie into the story very well.
The acting was generally excellent, but the plot was (intentionally) obscure, and the point of the film is not at all clear, other than as a character study of a nuclear family in 1950s Texas.
We both felt that the controversial “natural history” section in the beginning of the film that recaps the creation of the universe (providing a possible tie-in to Job) did little to enhance the film, and could have been cut with little harm. (Malick is reportedly considering an companion IMAX film, Voyage of Time that would expand on this section.)
Anyway, I’d love to hear other people’s ideas about this film. And I have one question:
[spoiler]In a key scene, the father played by Brad Pitt tells the middle son over dinner to be quiet unless he has something important to say. A minute later the boy says something, very brief and very softly, and provokes a violent outburst from the father.
I liked it a lot, but a big part of it resonated with me for personal reasons. I’m not a fan of spoilering in movie threads, so everyone note:
*HERE BE SPOILERS!!!
Some things to think about:
You’re right that it’s not a traditional narrative; instead it’s a somewhat autobiographical sketch of his upbringing in Waco in a family where the dad kept pursuing patents with little success (that part is true). Was his dad also a hard-ass bastard? I’m guessing the answer is yes.
Job spends a lot of time asking why God is sending him a shitstorm of pain, and he never gets a clear answer. There are two main shitstorms in this movie: the death of the brother (which seems to hit the parents more), and the way the dad acts toward all of them (which clearly hits Jack more). Malick’s answer to Job’s constant questions seems to be “look, you can either say the universe sucks and it’s a dinosaur-eat-dinosaur world, or you can recognize I have a greater purpose here - grace - and accept what’s happening.” With Malick leaning toward grace, clearly.
I struggled for a while to understand whose POV this was going to be, but even though his mother gets a lot of focus on ‘grace’ in the resolution, I still think it’s Jack’s story. There are some wonderful moments where he’s struggling back and forth between the two possibilities; he does something awful, and then sitting there with his mom he doesn’t even want her to look at him. Or the thing that happens with his brother and the airgun.
I could do without all of the planetology, but I have a guess at what drives it. The point of time we occupy now isn’t the universe…we’re just occupying the leading edge of billions of years of forces and events, shaped by nature and grace, that result in that particular moment…which makes them more powerful, and also harder to resist. My reading, anyway. It could have used significantly fewer emulsion and Hubble shots and made the same point.
Those were initial thoughts after seeing it…I’m still thinking it over and may see it again.
So that first shitstorm puzzled me a bit, as it didn’t turn out to be as much as a shitstorm as I thought it was going to be. They introduce it very early on in the movie, and the parents react to the news the way you’d imagine parents would react to such news. And then for much of the movie it isn’t referenced again. To be fair, much of the movie takes place before that death, but still – I had trouble figuring out how it fit in with the rest of the movie. I had actually forgotten about it for most of the movie, until I was reminded at the very end.
It wasn’t clear to me why that particular event was introduced (other than to suggest more of the randomness of nature and the way the universe can suck sometimes) if it wasn’t going to be explored further.
I too had mixed feelings about the film, although (in contrast to some others) I actually liked all that creation of the universe stuff.
Nothing to do with this film, but ages ago my grandmother called me and said, “You do a lot of stuff in theater, and one of the women here at the retirement home has a grandson who wants to make films someday. He’ll be visiting here tomorrow - would you like to meet him? Maybe you will have something in common?”
I stupidly declined grandma’s offer to meet her friend’s grandson - it was Mrs. Malick’s grandson, Terrence.
I enjoyed the film, but I thought it really suffered from lacking a narrative. I also thought that everything it did, The Thin Red Line did better except the cinematography. The voiceovers were more significant and focused in TTRL, there was more (or rather, there was actual) momentum, what seemed to me to be the point of the film was more clear…etc.
I thought the scenes with the little boys were great, though. They really seemed like family.
DMark, I let out an “ARRRGH!” after reading your post.
I totally get this, though I have a theory about what’s going on. That brother really has two jobs to do in this movie, as far as I can tell: One is to increase the pressure on Jack by being a better son (except for one moment), which gets sealed into history because he dies too young to ever prove otherwise [and note that throwaway line when Jack is on the phone, something like “I’m sorry about what I said…no, I miss him too every year.” So the tension is possibly still there somehow]. The second is that during the movie he also is the only person who truly wants to trust Jack (it’s even explicit: “I trust you”), and Jack eventually tests that. When he’s forgiven, it seems (again) about the way of grace.
The problem, of course, is that you never feel any personal attachment to the brother. I have to wonder if, in his 6-hour version, Malick expands on that relationship. [and how about brother 3? A complete mystery. I’ll bet he grows up in Waco running a filling station]
The (non CGI component of) this film works fantastically for me as long as I’m willing to surrender the need for a clear narrative line…
I didn’t think it suffered from a lack of narrative. You certainly have to be in the right frame of mind to watch but if you’re able to just watch the movie, think of nothing else, not let your mind wander off, then it feels like it just naturally flows.
I thought the kids were fantastic, specifically the oldest brother. I wasn’t a fan of any of Sean Penn’s scenes, and though the end part on the beach dragged on too long.
I didn’t think afterwards “ZOMG it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen”, but in the nearly two months since I saw it I don’t think a day has gone by where I haven’t found myself thinking about one of the scenes or images.
Agree completely. I won’t say I thought it was the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it was one of very few singular movies I’ve seen. Like Synecdoche, New York, I just can’t think of another film to compare this to; it is its own thing.
Obviously, a filmmaker who disregards the classical unities is choosing to shrink his audience. Malick, IMO, makes this one work because of his awe-inspiring cinematography and editing. I was rapt throughout the movie, and the spell broke when I was leaving the theater and heard one member of a couple in front of me complaining that “nothing happened!”
Side note: When I came out of the theater, I saw that the same theater was showing Cave of Forgotten Dreams too, so I saw that one immediately after Tree of Life. It’s not often you get to see new Malick and new Herzog back-to-back; that’s my kind of day.
I just saw this movie at the theater, going in completely cold knowing nothing other than it was Brad Pitt’s new movie and it had Sean Penn too.
That’s all I knew.
My first thought, at about three minutes in, was - this must be by the same person who wrote or directed The Thin Red Line. Oh joy. I’m going to be hit over the head repeatedly by sophomoric psuedo-wisdom for the next ‘whatever time a movie should take plus two’.
And I was not wrong. Insufferable wankery. Irritating editing. Insultingly ‘profound’ and interspersed with 2nd-rank discovery channel footage.
I’m glad it’s over and who did he have to blow to get this film made?
Oh yeah, and I almost laughed out loud when we see images of the surface of the sun, and the mother’s voice-over says “My Son (sun)…My soul (Sol)…Heal us(Helios)”.
Did anybody else make the mistake of seeing this piece of artistic wanking? Pitt and Penn should be ashamed of themselves for participating in it, although Pitt made an honest effort to wring some sort of sense out of the script. What a total waste of 2+ hours; the only redeeming thing is that the on-demand cost was only $5. I’m willing to concede that perhaps I just didn’t understand what the film maker was trying to say, but as a reasonably intelligent adult, I should have been able to wring something from all that.
If you saw it, what is your analysis? I don’t have one.
There was a thread on this movie already but I can’t find it now.
The Tree of Life is my favorite movie of all time.
Just kidding. It was an unmitigated disaster. I appreciate when people push the boundaries of art, but I though this film was just unfair to the audience. It should have had a warning at the beginning that this movie is (too) long, has no story, is confusing, annoyingly edited (do we really need to see 5 seconds of a child running through grass edited into 7 parts taken from minutely different camera angles? No, we don’t).
Even Sean Penn panned this thing with a comment along the lines of “Malick shot some beautiful film; unfortunately it ended up on the cutting room floor.”
