So there we are. Rewatched The Tree of Life and watched To the Wonder. My opinion on the former hasn't changed at all; and I'm sorry to say that I'm not even sure that watching the rest of his films deepened my understanding of that one any. Having seen anything by Malick (in my case, The Thin Red Line) is probably advisable, just so you don't go in expecting anything conventional. But too many probably would have blunted the impact. It certainly did with To the Wonder. It felt like self-parody in places. I laughed out loud, rolled my eyes, and snorted as often as I nodded my head in appreciation.
To the Wonder is a puzzling film. A lot of critics seem to be taking from it the same thing they took from Tree of Life, but I see it as trying, at least in part, to do something different. That film was largely about an ecstasy (embodied/accessed by/through the mother) that can never be effaced - the light that never goes out. This one is at least sometimes trying to be about what happens when that light does go out. Loss of faith, God, joy, love, beauty, what-have-you. That's a bold enough departure that I was swayed, sometimes. Parts of the film are undeniably there.
But I suspect (and Malick's such an auteur that you almost can't help but judge his films based on the personality they present, even if it's not real) that Malick hasn't ever actually felt what his fallen priest Javier Bardem feels. There's too much angelic twirling in the fields in this film: too much of the Wonder seeps in. So it feels like he's gesturing toward a depression that the mortals who surround him assure him exists, and that he feels he should probably try to address if he wants to get everybody to tune into the Wonder, but that in the end he's clueless about.
And again, I think it's because he's clueless about actual people. The Real Oklahoma People that Javier Bardem encounters are not presented as anything but grotesques. They speak, but just like the rest of the actors their words are drowned out by Emotive Music and whispered voiceovers by other people. They're not individuals, and in the end they're hardly human. We're certainly not invited to empathize with them as we are with Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, and Rachel McAdams. And there's no in-between. In Malick's universe there are Beautiful People and then there are grotesques.
I'm starting to find myself puzzled by the cult of Terrence Malick. His films are dazzlingly shot, provocatively edited, exquisitely scored, and in so many ways different from typical film that I can understand the initial excitement. But so far he's only demonstrated an ability to do one thing, and it's not the kind of thing that lends itself to reiteration. His themes are almost childishly naïve, and his spirituality is a combination of New Age facileness and old-style Catholic mysticism. And his characters - okay, granted he's trying to deal in human archetypes, not individual characters. But what are those archetypes? Man goes out and works upon the world. Woman stays home and waxes maternal. I mean, he's utterly regressive.
I imagine Terrence Malick as the cinematic equivalent of Sarah McLachlan singing "It's A Man's Man's Man's World."
Showing posts with label terrence malick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrence malick. Show all posts
Monday, June 9, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Second thoughts on Terrence Malick
I'm two-thirds of the way through a Terrence Malick project: to see all of his films in a concentrated period. In the last week I've watched Badlands and Days of Heaven, both for the first time, The Thin Red Line for the second, and The New World for the first. By this time next week I expect to have rewatched Tree of Life and seen To the Wonder, which I somehow missed even hearing about when it came out. I guess there's something to this ivory tower thing.
I expect I'll have more to say then, but for the moment, here's where I'm at.
I think I like Malick when he's at his most untethered. He's not particularly interested in character or story, so he's at his weakest when he tries to stick closest to those things. Conversely he's at his best when his material is so mundane that he's able to leap freely into the realm of what he is particularly interested in. Accordingly, so far I think Tree of Life and Days of Heaven are his best.
I can follow him into the mystic. Communion with nature, film as religious experience, the epiphany, the world infused with the glory of God. All okay. To be honest I'm not there right now in my life, but I was once, and the memory of it is still vivid enough that I will argue for it as an important human experience, and a valid subject for artistic creation. I never want to get far enough into the material that I stop being able to appreciate Van Morrison or Gerard Manley Hopkins. And that's the kind of vision Malick has, essentially: "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."
That being said, I'm not sure that's the proper response to everything. Proper isn't the word I'm looking for there, though. I'm not sure that every occasion is created equal as an occasion for that sort of visionmongering. There are some stories, some subjects, that perhaps might ask (in a polite, querulous tone) for a more conventional treatment. Even if it might dictate different conclusions.
That's why The Thin Red Line and The New World leave me nonplussed. The New World is a triumph of technique and feeling, but in the end it repeats the same old myths with the same old noble-savage rhetoric at heart. The story demands more. The history demands more. The Thin Red Line is more promising - the bloodshed-in-Eden irony is rich with possibility - but the actual experience of guys in combat demands a little more respectful hearing than Malick gives it. Both movies are notoriously filled with actors who are underutilized or even eliminated in the editing, and I think that indicates more than just an inefficient technique: it indicates that stories are being considered and then discarded. Suppressed.
Saying that Malick is uninterested in story and character is another way of saying that he's uninterested in people, at least as individuals. As flesh and blood. He's only interested in humans in the abstract, or in his own vision, which in the end is the same thing. His mystic vision is the kind of religion that cannot allow for the messiness of real people. It's antihumanist. In a way that makes his films perfect for a particular kind of postmodernist: a lot of us these days are very comfortable with the idea of humanity's perspective being decentered in favor of something else. But this is also how the left wraps around and becomes the right: Malick's diminution of human individuality in favor of the Big Truth isn't so different, in the end, from that behind an overtly religious epic like The Passion of the Christ. Right? There's no point in telling John Smith's story, or Private Witt's, really, because the only story that matters is the One Story.
Which is why I find Malick most satisfying when he's not pretending to do anything else. Tree of Life and Days of Heaven are about nothing but themselves and the vision. The Thin Red Line and The New World feel, especially the former, like they were supposed to be something else, something altogether more engaged with humanity, before the director gave up and retreated into his private world.
Badlands is the odd one out at this point, which is no surprise since it was his first. I wish I could have known what it was like to see that without knowing what he'd go on to do. It feels at first blush much more character-focused, much more invested in its people as people, actually interacting with each other and their environment, then his later movies. But the archetypal aspects (retreat from man's world into the natural, yearning for the transcendent) are obvious. And the nods toward a pop-culture-savvy cynicism, which might have seemed quite bracing in the early '70s when this was his only film, are now barely perceptible, and easily neglected because they're clearly not where Malick's heart lies. Maybe they were then, though.
I expect I'll have more to say then, but for the moment, here's where I'm at.
I think I like Malick when he's at his most untethered. He's not particularly interested in character or story, so he's at his weakest when he tries to stick closest to those things. Conversely he's at his best when his material is so mundane that he's able to leap freely into the realm of what he is particularly interested in. Accordingly, so far I think Tree of Life and Days of Heaven are his best.
I can follow him into the mystic. Communion with nature, film as religious experience, the epiphany, the world infused with the glory of God. All okay. To be honest I'm not there right now in my life, but I was once, and the memory of it is still vivid enough that I will argue for it as an important human experience, and a valid subject for artistic creation. I never want to get far enough into the material that I stop being able to appreciate Van Morrison or Gerard Manley Hopkins. And that's the kind of vision Malick has, essentially: "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."
That being said, I'm not sure that's the proper response to everything. Proper isn't the word I'm looking for there, though. I'm not sure that every occasion is created equal as an occasion for that sort of visionmongering. There are some stories, some subjects, that perhaps might ask (in a polite, querulous tone) for a more conventional treatment. Even if it might dictate different conclusions.
That's why The Thin Red Line and The New World leave me nonplussed. The New World is a triumph of technique and feeling, but in the end it repeats the same old myths with the same old noble-savage rhetoric at heart. The story demands more. The history demands more. The Thin Red Line is more promising - the bloodshed-in-Eden irony is rich with possibility - but the actual experience of guys in combat demands a little more respectful hearing than Malick gives it. Both movies are notoriously filled with actors who are underutilized or even eliminated in the editing, and I think that indicates more than just an inefficient technique: it indicates that stories are being considered and then discarded. Suppressed.
Saying that Malick is uninterested in story and character is another way of saying that he's uninterested in people, at least as individuals. As flesh and blood. He's only interested in humans in the abstract, or in his own vision, which in the end is the same thing. His mystic vision is the kind of religion that cannot allow for the messiness of real people. It's antihumanist. In a way that makes his films perfect for a particular kind of postmodernist: a lot of us these days are very comfortable with the idea of humanity's perspective being decentered in favor of something else. But this is also how the left wraps around and becomes the right: Malick's diminution of human individuality in favor of the Big Truth isn't so different, in the end, from that behind an overtly religious epic like The Passion of the Christ. Right? There's no point in telling John Smith's story, or Private Witt's, really, because the only story that matters is the One Story.
Which is why I find Malick most satisfying when he's not pretending to do anything else. Tree of Life and Days of Heaven are about nothing but themselves and the vision. The Thin Red Line and The New World feel, especially the former, like they were supposed to be something else, something altogether more engaged with humanity, before the director gave up and retreated into his private world.
Badlands is the odd one out at this point, which is no surprise since it was his first. I wish I could have known what it was like to see that without knowing what he'd go on to do. It feels at first blush much more character-focused, much more invested in its people as people, actually interacting with each other and their environment, then his later movies. But the archetypal aspects (retreat from man's world into the natural, yearning for the transcendent) are obvious. And the nods toward a pop-culture-savvy cynicism, which might have seemed quite bracing in the early '70s when this was his only film, are now barely perceptible, and easily neglected because they're clearly not where Malick's heart lies. Maybe they were then, though.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011)
Me partly because it plugged into something I'd already been thinking about as a result of seeing Happy Together a couple of nights before: film as something other than dramaturgy.
Tree of Life has a story, certainly, and scenes and actors and performances; but that aspect of the film is so intentionally attenuated that I came away thinking that the story (and I'm sure if you know Malick this is obvious) isn't really the point.
But that's not quite the same as saying, as I would about much of Wong Kar-Wai's work, that the patterns of imagery, or the pattern-imagery, is the main point and the story is only incidental. Rather, I came away from Tree of Life feeling that the story was of paramount importance, just not as a story. Not as drama, the way we commonly think about it. Rather, it seemed to me that this film is story as ritual - drama as ceremony, the way it began in most cultures - this film is like a mass.
Viz. The story is one of brothers growing up in Waco, Texas, in the mid 20th century: we get to know them and both of their parents. But despite some memorable specificity in several of the scenes I'd argue that we don't really get to know any of these people as individuals, but only as archetypes - the Lawgiving Father, the Lifegiving Mother, etc. And the life events they go through are presented as universal stages as well - the Oedipal stages that the firstborn son goes through, for example.
We're being shown, not specific lives, but essentialized Life. And that's why it makes perfect sense thematically (even if it's a bit jarring) for this film to digress and go back to the beginning of life, tracing evolution through, yes, the dinosaurs up to the present day. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, right? And ontogeny begets ontology, in this case: we're being shown the life of Life, as well as the life of Man, in its most essentialized outlines, to enlighten us. We're being told the Story of Life, in order to help us find some transcendent meaning in it. Just like the liturgy of the mass tells a particular story of the universe and our place in it.
I don't think I've ever seen a film do that before. At least, no film meant to be seen in theaters, rather than church rec halls or other dedicated spaces...
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