The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick – 2011 – USA
 

That a Terrence Malick film can be ‘booed’ at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places, pretty much tells us everything we need to know about contemporary film culture; it STINKS.  The world over, critics, producers and audiences alike all want innocuous entertainment on one hand or the most self-righteous crusading propaganda on the other.  Nothing else is tolerated.  Transparency is valued above all, and any interest in mystery or ambivalence, or (god forbid) a desire for transcendence, is looked on as weakness.  Critics cannot fathom the possibility that a film might not be lecturing them, so they naturally react with hostility to anything that appears to have more esoteric goals.  The main complaints about The Tree of Life are that it is too confusing, pretentious and too long; I found it none of these.  I saw an artist marveling at the workings of life and how individuals look for - and find - meaning in the chaos of nature.  I also saw probably the most extraordinary portrayal of childhood, or at least boyhood, as I’ve ever seen in any fictional context.  I also have no idea what is so infuriatingly confusing about the story to some viewers; it seems clear to me that a man (Sean Penn’s character) is caught in a reverie about his upbringing and, with the perspective of time and distance, is seeing that there was so much more complexity than he could comprehend as a boy.  He recalls specific episodes with clarity but also ponders how they relate to his, and all mankind’s, place in the universe.  The same independent streak he shows as a boy also prompts his stream of consciousness away from the concrete triviality of his immediate surroundings.  The film is not too long or too fragmented; it’s exactly the way Malick wants it to be, which automatically makes it infinitely more valid than films that have been idiot-proofed and homogenized with endless test screenings.  (Harry Potter movies have been significantly longer, but no one objects because their highest ambition is to babysit and bottle-feed the most undemanding audiences.)  Malick is one of only a handful of directors still alive who can genuinely be thought of as auteurs (film artists), and his films are so infrequent – (so far, five in the last 40 years); if we pretend to care about film at all, we should react with joy and respect when someone of his stature has something new to show us.  The reaction to The Tree of Life really nauseates me, and it completely dashes whatever hope the film itself might give me that the cinema could survive as an art.