Malick vs. Spielberg

So Terence Malick must have finally seen Jurassic Park. And his reaction was like "this Spielberg commercial fluff, I'll show you how to make a dinosaur movie." Thus was born Tree of Life. It's an extraordinary film and also extraordinarily flawed. It's not for everyone, though you like to think it could be. Badlands and Days of Heaven basically give him a free pass for the rest of his life to try whatever he wants. Thin Red Line was brilliant, better than 99.8% of films, though not the masterpiece of the first two. Still, he could make a Lars Von Trier film or Star Wars 1-3 and re-edit the original to make Greedo shoot first and that wouldn't remove his master credentials.

Malick is a poet who tackles incredibly difficult questions in a way that is truly challenging. How do we reconcile the absolutely impossible infinity of the universe with our lives and arbitrary living or dying? How do children become adults? Tree of Life plays like a 2001 of the heart, though not the perfect work Kubrick delivered.

It's easy but perhaps inaccurate to describe it as a film about the meaning of life. It looks at something more specific, albeit reflecting back the impossibility of answering that question. Despite the philosophical nature of the film, it's not explored through philosophy, but wonder, and thus is more powerful.

He uses a similar approach to the Thin Red Line. Stunning images, natural beauty mixed with narrative, flashbacks and non-linearity and multiple voiceover perspectives. The multiple narrators in Thin Red Line really made sense, exploring the perspectives of all the people involved in the battle. Here, it just adds confusion. Malick should have gone with a single narrator (interestingly his first two films worked so well because of the single viewpoint). The mother was the right choice. She's the one who adds something unique that doesn't come from the scenes. It doesn't help that the whispering, gravelly style means that you can't differentiate who speaks. Brad Pitt does not sound like Sean Penn, except in a Malick voiceover.

Additionally, the Thin Red Line did such an exquisite job covering so much of the same material on life and death and the meaning of existence in the face of nature and futility, that this film felt in some ways like a retread. Had it delivered on its promise, I think it would have ended up with something more personal, more encompassing, more targeted in its exploration of love. But the film's flaws end up making a lot of the voices sound like continued thoughts from the Thin Red Line. Important questions sure, but better to explore them in new and different ways.

Most viewers will probably stop watching during the astronomical sequence. This is where the film becomes severely imbalanced. Malick is knocking on the door of something incredible and then it detaches into a nature documentary. The film really loses its thread and its momentum. It comes back, but the viewer is left with a long intro, a history of the world up through the dinosaurs, and then a long sequence fixed in a point in time without the connections to make them all work together.

It sounds like it might be absurd, and arguably it is so in the film, but Malick is knocking on the right door. The movie needs a re-edit. A serious one. He may be a genius but he needed someone to tell him "No. This doesn't work. Redo it."

The cinematography throughout is stunning. The astronomical and ocean images are gorgeous and mysterious. Music is wonderful, as is the case in all Malick movies. To make his poems work, exquisite musical selection is required, and that is part of his genius, if never really acknowledged. Following the history of time, there is an extraordinary childhood sequence. If only it integrated better with what came before, something great may have happened. Of course, this sequence may be less and less relevant to viewers, as simple childhoods may be gone forever.

This leads into the interminable section of the film. It's interesting to see the family dynamics, but they are too one-note and excessively long. I grew bored. Really bored. I basically gave up on the movie in my mind. Finally, he moved the story along and produced flashes of genius that snapped me back in. Unfortunately, the end drags out, giving the Return of the King a run for its snooze-inducing, please-let-it-end indulgence.

There is a profound connection in the film between a question and answer about the mother. How did she cope with losing a child (she gives him away to god)? Unfortunately it's answered over two hours. It's a stunning look at what it really means to love and live, yet it's lost, forgotten really, in the excessively long section of the film developing the boy. I see how Malick may have wanted to hold onto that progression in the son, but with his techniques he could have compressed it and added so much more power.

For another director, I might say this movie didn't quite know what it wanted to be- which story to focus on, what to remove. Only that criticism would be pushing towards a conventional and less profound movie. What's crazy is that Malick knew that all those pieces do belong together to form this story of life. In the final result though, they weren't fit together correctly to make it happen. It needed at least forty minutes cut, maybe an hour. Had that happened, maybe this is a masterpiece. As it is, Malick grappled with something nearly impossible and came up short. But good lord that's what artists should be doing.

It'll be interesting to see what happens if Malick watches Indiana Jones and the Stupid Crystal Skulls.

PS: I would love to have this be available for public domain recuts. No doubt the editors were skilled, but there are so many limits in production. A film like this has an infinite number of possible edits. I would love to see what people who believe in what he's going for could do. Someone would find a cut of this that takes it to another level beyond failed masterpiece.