"Tree of Life": Malick's Beautiful Misstep

Usually the late spring and early summer's movie offerings are synonymous with light-as-a-feather, empty calorie escapist fare.  While there isn't exactly a shortage of that fare at the cinema this month, this June boasts a surprising amount of thought-provoking fare -- or films that are at least sold as such.

The most acclaimed of the higher-end films to come out are two new films from veteran critical darlings Woody Allen and Terrence Malick. Malick's new film, The Tree of Life, is a study of the randomness of life, family relationships, and being haunted by the past (both of one's own life and of life itself) -- or rather, it wants to be.  Unfortunately, he still hasn't learned his lesson, and The Tree of Life, while visually appealing and poetic, suffers from root-rot at the core of its storytelling and emotional appeal.

This isn't to say that Malick isn't a visionary or lacks skill or style.  Far from it.  But often, when you have someone who is so single-mindedly devoted to his own unique vision, and prone to mind-boggling philosophical and art-fetishist pretentions, his best work can really only come when he has a "bad cop" to reality-check and balance him and curb his enthusiasm where it needs to be.  (Think of Costello without Abbot, Martin without Rowan, even Jerry Lewis without Dean Martin.)

In The Tree of Life, we surrealistically float between the mid-life crisis of a contemporary fifty-something businessman (Sean Penn, great but in little more than a cameo), who may or may not be flirting with suicide.  We know almost nothing about his present life besides the surface, but he still seems haunted by the death (likely in Vietnam combat, around 1970 or so, though even this isn't made clear) of his then 19-year-old brother. He idolized this brother while growing up in Waco under a super-strict and resentful but loving military-industrial-complex WWII veteran dad (Brad Pitt) and a saintly, quiet intellectual mom.  We never see Penn's character or his brother beyond about 11 or 12, as the film focuses on their 1950s upbringing caught between these two parental spiritual extremes (and a third brother who seems almost sitcommish in his third-wheel-ism - there's really no purpose for him in the story).  The movie stops in mid-sentence, as it were, for about a 10 or 15 minute long, dialog-free sequence of erupting volcanoes, the "big bang", CGI dinosaurs, and the rest, as if the movie had changed the channel to a classic '70s episode of Nova.

This non-narrative playgrounding may be confusing to some viewers, but not me; it was an obvious, even insulting, metaphor for how (in all of our lives), all the story of human and evolutionary life itself has led up to where we are today with our own families and upbringing.  The only worthwhile feeling I got watching this self-indulgence, besides that of my intelligence being insulted and time wasted with such pretentious filmic blather, was how incredibly random -- or not, if one believes in God or fate -- it is that we end up in the time and family settings with the people that we do.

The movie is, typical of a Malick film, gorgeously shot and filled to overflowing with heavy-handed symbolism and often beautiful imagery, but beyond that, it's the cinema equivalent of a classic Alan Greenspan speech to the Congress:  something that makes many "grammar of cinema" auterists and enthusiasts go ga-ga (it won the Cannes Palm d'Or) because of what seems to be brilliance, but is really just what the late journalist Shana Alexander called "prose Styrofoam" -- deliberately gnomic sound and fury signifying nothing, and ultimately almost meaningless.

For another time-traveling flick to check out (or not, depending on taste), there's Woody Allen's acclaimed Midnight in Paris, with Owen Wilson leading an all-star cast as a screenwriter taking a sentimental journey to the City of Lights where he time-tunnels back and forth from the present to the 1920s/30s Hemingway Paris he idolizes.  Besides being much lighter in tone, the big difference between Allen's flick and Malick's is that, while both filmmakers luxuriate in elitism and pretention like a bubble bath, one takes himself deadly seriously, and the other has the standup-comedian nebbish's good sense to let us in on the joke.