The Tree of Life

The credits rolled and I turned to my companions and harrumphed, "What a huge load of self-indulgent crap." But then, I thought, isn't that, perhaps, a part of what it means to be an artist? Isn't all art to some degree an indulgence of self? The Tree of Life is not to my taste, but it is art. High art. By a master of his chosen form. This is the fifth feature film by Terrence Malick, the director of Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), and then after a twenty-year hiatus, The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). I've had the pleasure of seeing all but The New World on the big screen, though not in the order the films were released. The first Malick film I saw was Days of Heaven, as part of a double-feature with the just-released Tess (1979). Bless Baltimore's Charles Theater for the years it had as an "art house theatre" before it went commercial! Polanski's film has dimmed in memory in the thirty odd years since I saw it, but there are images from Days of Heaven that remain as fresh as the day I saw them. Before Malick I never knew it was possible to have such a tactile film experience. I sat in the theatre and felt the wind and the sun on my skin, the smell of wheat and dust in my nose. It took me a long time to catch Badlands on the big screen, but I finally saw it in a Milwaukee revival house around the same time that The Thin Red Line was released. Some critics consider Badlands Malick's finest film but, while I found it strange and beautiful (in its own way), it could not compete with twenty years of anticipation. The New World simply holds no interest for me, and until it comes to me easily as a cable viewing or a Netflix Watch Instantly I won't be going out of my way to see it. Certainly not after seeing The Tree of Life.

Malick has the right to make any film he wants, and considering the infamously slow gestation of The Tree of Life and his other post-'70s movies that's exactly what he plans on doing, i.e. making highly personal films. In this case, a two hour and eighteen minute theological/spiritual meditation.

"A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." - Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

"Man, woman, birth, death, infinity." - Ben Casey

A spiritual meditation without one original thought, without humor, without charm. It's a film encased in an amber coating made up in equal parts of schmaltzy musings on the birth of the universe and the development of life and Malick's undeniable way with a striking image. But it's all image, a series of carefully rendered tableaux. It's derivative to a fault, passing over the line of commentary into appropriation. Of everything. The Tree of Life is a kitchen sink movie, nothing left out. Man, woman, birth, death, infinity. Oh, my!

What's particularly frustrating is that there are many signs of how talented a film-maker Malick can be. The long section set in Waco, Texas, with Brad Pitt as a vain, ambitious, bullying father and the busy kid-lives of his children and their friends, is rendered so carefully one feels at times it has the documentary exactness of home movies. Well, home movies painted by J.M.W. Turner or Tintoretto. Everywhere there is light just outside the scene. It creeps in windows, doors, splashes faces, but everywhere is muted. Nearly every outdoor scene is set at twilight or the sky is overcast. I suppose we are meant to read this one of two ways: that life is a search for the Light or that we are separated from the Light (god, Jesus, Buddha, whatever). "Everywhere the ceremony is drowned." ("The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats.) In one case, literally, with a pool-side death of a boy. Much of the Waco section is undeniably beautiful, but like Kubrick, whose 2001 is a jumping off point for Malick, there is an insurmountable emotional distancing. Malick shows more than he tells. 

I also found the central drama wanting for significance. American art, looking at only the films, has given us a lot of bad fathers. But Brad Pitt's Dad endures more authorial opprobrium than I think he deserves. At one point the son with whom he has the most contrary relationship considers an action that would kill his old man, and I found the notion rather far-fetched. Even factoring in the Oedipal drama. Which, by the way, in terms of pure psychology, comes about eight years late in the development of the son. It's actually a little creepy the way Malick depicts it. 

Alright, a couple of final thoughts:

It's probably a petty observation but: Am I really supposed to believe that thirty year old actress Jessica Chastain is old enough to have a nineteen year old son? I know Hollywood casts this way routinely, but Malick isn't, I thought, a Hollywood director.  

What a thankless role for Sean Penn. Good on Malick, I suppose, for having the clout.

Unless the dinosaur is a stand in for Jesus it probably shouldn't look like it's walking on water. It's been almost twenty years since Spielberg gave us realistically rendered dinos. Take a hint, Malick. 

For a heterosexual director Malick certainly know how to cast the prettiest men and boys.  

Name That Butt!

The butt featured in the movie-stills below belongs to the son of a world-famous Pop artist.
Can you name actor, dad, and film?

Movies 2010, Part 2: The Very Good & The Awful

By no means complete here are a few movies I saw in 2010 that I liked an awful lot, but were, for one reason or another, flawed: ambitious failures, great ideas halfheartedly executed, or just lacking that certain spark that one knows for genius when one sees it.


I Love You, Phillip Morris
Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (2009)



In the end this thoroughly enjoyable romp about a gay man on the wrong side of the law and the man he desperately loves doesn't have much there there. But it's a fun trip. Carrey's manic, plastic-faced shtick marries well with the character he plays. McGregor gives an outstanding performance as Carrey's soft-spoken, demure love-interest. I Love You, Phillip Morris is gay gay gay gay gay with a surprising, refreshing lack of condescension or sincerity and solemnity.

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky (2010)



Am I arrogant enough to claim that my interpretation of Black Swan is more insightful than any of the critics I've read? Maaaaybe. I think I saw a fable about the transformative power of performance and the pursuit of perfection. The critics keep talking "horror movie" and "psychosexual thriller." This is like calling The Wizard of Oz a road movie or Frankenstein a novel about the dangers of home-schooling. Well, ymmv. I don't really care for Portman as an actress but she's very good here. I love Mila Kunis, and I wish she'd been given more to do, but what she does is done very nicely. And, of course, it's beautifully filmed.

Splice
Vincenzo Natali (2010)



Scene by scene it's very engaging, filled with ideas, and often deliciously creepy. But it never really jells into somehow coherent as a whole.

My roommate and I saw this at a budget theatre. There is a scene in the film toward the end with which the hoi poiloi were not the least bit happy. I've never heard an entire audience erupt in such vocal disgust unless it was the time I saw Brokeback Mountain with a group of patients on a psychiatric ward. (A story for another time.)


The Social Network
David Fincher (2010)



Despite Sorkin's smart, sharp writing let's face it, this is the Marvel Comics version of the story, Facebook: Origins. Nonetheless, I had a blast watching it. But then I felt the same way about Iron Man 2.


The Kids Are All Right
Lisa Cholodenko (2010)



What I love about Cholodenko's films is that her characters are allowed to explore new emotional, social, and sexual territory without being punished (as is the case with too many American movies). This film's major flaw was that it was clearly pandering toward a straight audience. I'm suspicious of movies where the protagonists are gay characters but there is significantly steamier heterosexual sex. 

The Messenger
Oren Moverman (2009)



Thoughtful. Well-acted. Moving and realistic portrayals of loss & grief.  A bit programmatic.

Year of the Dog
Mike White (2007)



Written and directed by Mike White who also wrote and starred in arguably my favorite gay-content film, Chuck and Buck. Here, Molly Shannon plays Peggy, a lonely, socially inept woman devoted to her dog Pencil. When Pencil moves on to the big dog park in the sky, Peggy's life changes inexorably and in decidedly odd ways. There are some very good set pieces, and great support from Laura Dern, as an overly devoted mother from Hell, John C. Reilly, Peter Sarsgaard, and Regina King.

So that is, along with the previous post, the best new or new-ish movies I saw in 2010. I saw many other fine films, but they are older than the three year scope I chose for these lists and often all ready very well known.

The two worst movies I saw in 2010 in the theatre were:  Love & Other Drugs (Edward Zwick) and Morning Glory (Roger Michell, who also directed Enduring Love which was also unbelievably awful).

Best Movies (I Saw) In 2010

I'm not in the movie business, I'm not a professional critic, and I don't have money to burn. I see what I can, when I can, how I can. This is a list of the best films I saw in 2010. To the best of my knowledge none of these selections are more than three years old (and some, of course, are 2010), and in most cases didn't have wide releases. They are only loosely ranked, with films toward the top of the list more well thought of than those toward the bottom, but I wouldn't bother to list a film at all if I didn't think it was well worth seeking out.

Police, Adjective
Corneliu Porumboiu (2009)

A bone-dry, black comedy from Romania about a police detective pursuing the pettiest of a petty criminal, and the ethical dilemma he encounters in that pursuit. This is a stately, slow-moving affair that I'm afraid some viewers might liken to "watching paint dry." But patience is well-rewarded.

 



The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke (2009)



Haneke's sumptuous b&w near-epic length study of the fomenting of evil in an Austrian backwater in the years leading up to World War I. Gorgeous, constantly engaging, sublime performances including the many child-actors.


 I Am Love
Luca Guadagnino (2009)




There is no singing but this is opera - tragic opera. Guadagnino seems to love all that he turns his camera upon: Milan in winter, the beauty of men & women, food, the natural world, architecture. Swinton is a marvel as the Russian wife of an Italian industrialist. 

Afterschool
Antonio Campos (2008)

 

A black comedy about living in the age of surveillance. Robert, an unhappy student at an upscale prep school accidentally videotapes the death by overdose of two girls, popular twin sisters. He's tasked with making a memorial video, and his result is, to say the least, not well received.  

  




Antichrist 
Lars von Trier (2009)

 

Von Trier's over-the-top beautiful and painful to watch examination of a couple lost to grief over a dead child. Also, a spiteful, bitter rebuke of psychotherapy, through and through. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart.

House (Hausu)
Nobuhiko Obayashi (1977)



This whacked-out roller-coaster ride of a movie makes the cut because it only recently had its first U.S. screenings. I had an opportunity to see it on the big screen at Atlanta's High Museum. House is a surreal horror film into which director Obayashi must have put every fucked up fantasy & nightmare he ever had. Four teenage girls go away for the summer to a relative's house and get picked off one by one. I promise you, this will be the only movie you've seen where a piano eats someone. Oh, and it's a boat-load of sexual subtext.


Big Fan
Robert D. Siegel (2009)



Almost too painful to watch in the way that it exactly captures its subjects: embarrassment, family dysfunction, and, most importantly, the way that a love of professional sports can substitute for, you know, having a life. Patton Oswalt gives a mesmerizing performance.

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974
Julian Jarrold (2009)



Based on David Peace's grim panic-attack of a novel Nineteen Seventy Four, this is the first and best of a three film series. It seems to me to that a great deal of effort was made to capture the period: clothes, cars, architecture, hair styles, and the ubiquitous and often difficult to discern Yorkshire regional accent. So many British police procedurals & crime dramas seem to be shot from the same script, and this trilogy suffers those defects. But this stand-alone film is at the forefront because of the elegant filmmaking and acting. Andrew Garfield is my favorite new(ish) British actor. Look for him also in the very fine Never Let Me Go.

 










Bluebeard
Catherine Breillat (2009)



This brisk little film (78 minutes) delves into the nature of temptation, sibling rivalry, marriage, generosity, and cruelty. It's an awesome little film, and one of the most surprising I saw in 2010. 

Mother (Madeo) 
Joon-ho Bong (2009)



It's only by chance that this film is at the bottom of this list because, really, it's freakin' brilliant. It's very different but the compassion it displays puts me in mind of Denys Arcand. And if there were any justice in the world of cinema Hye-ja Kim would be an international sensation. She is called upon to a do a wide variety of things and she does everything with aplomb. This is one of those wonderful rare films where it is equally likely that one will laugh or cry at the same incident, or do both at once. 


Tomorrow: The runners-up. Maybe. Blogging is hard. And time-consuming! 

Repulsion

Roman Polanski's first English-language film was this 1965 study of a young woman's slide into schizophrenia. Written by Polanski and Gerard Brach. Photographed by Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day's Night, Frenzy, The Omen, and Star Wars: A New Hope). Catherine Deneuve as Carole, the young schizophrenic woman.

Over the last two decades (or so) I've had many friends and acquaintances dealing with schizophrenia. In my experience, Repulsion is one of the best representations of this illness I've seen. Minus the appalling homicides. The vast majority of schizophrenics are not at all prone to violence. The movie is billed as a horror film, or thriller, or some such, and at the time of its release the general public had little to no understanding of the disease of schizophrenia. And for an era with so much widespread ignorance Polanski & co. make a remarkably competent study of the disease. They get so much right. Deneuve's Carole is the right age for a first psychotic episode. Most schizophrenics are diagnosed in their late teens to early twenties. They get right the social withdrawal, magical thinking, paranoia, delusional thinking, aural & visual hallucinations, indifference to environment (temperature, bad smells), repetitive activity, etc. Which is not to say that Repulsion is a perfect representation of the illness. Deneuve's body language doesn't display the distinctive mannerisms of the schizophrenic, except for two instances where she really nails it. There's a scene where she takes a couple of swipe at her nose, like she's batting away a fly, and she could have been any of a number of folks I've known. In another scene she pointlessly irons a blouse with an unplugged iron.

Imperial Bedrooms

This excellent cover was designed by Chip Kidd.

 

Imperial Bedrooms begins with a display of pyrotechnic postmodernism. Ellis conflates several layers of artifice: the novel Less Than Zero, the film of the same name, the current novel, and the faux-reality, the artifice, in which these exist. I found it hugely satisfying, even goose-bump raising.

But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When the scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a beat before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. -- pp 8-9

How Julian's body winds up behind that apartment building, stabbed 159 times, is one of the chief concerns of Imperial Bedrooms, a L.A. noir as byzantine and inscrutable as Howard Hawks' screen adaptation of  Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And just as pleasurable. I thought I was done with Bret Easton Ellis. I'd read Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, in my early 20s, and thought I'd gone as far with him as I was willing to go, that I got "it." But then a Facebook friend (I can't recall who) posted that after reading Imperial Bedrooms she felt the need to "scrub my brain." Well, that is for me a strong recommendation. One of the things I've learned as a consumer of art is that there are artists who essentially mine the same vein over and over again, and if the results are entertaining, stimulating, thought-provoking, than it's a fine, good thing. Ellis is, I think, this kind of artist. But I can understand why some folks don't want to go where he wants to take them. The world he renders is a dark, dreary, violent, casually cruel place. One that I don't doubt for a minute actually exists. I find his characters utterly convincing. And the dialogue sharp and perfect. I read a few of the reviews of Imperial Bedrooms and I was struck by how unforgiving they were, and obtuse. Both Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon have produced noirs as their most recent efforts, but they didn't get shit about it. And, while Johnson's Nobody Move is hugely entertaining it's a very slight novel in comparison to Imperial Bedrooms.  Anyways, thank you anonymous Facebook friend for the unintended recommendation.


Robert Downey, Jr. as Julian in the film Less Than Zero

Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon

In 2004 I received Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Like Bad News from a CD club. After listening to it I imagined I was a Modest Mouse fan. It's a great record. In 2005, Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) released a disc of Modest Mouse covers, Tiny Cities. It's become one of my all-time favorite albums. The videos above represent the entire album in the same order as the CD tracks. But, oddly, after collecting most of Modest Mouse's CDs I have to confess I'm not much of Modest Mouse fan after all. If Sun Kil Moon covered all their music I'd be a happy camper. Except, of course, for Good News.


Because it so needed to be said!