There comes a point in every cinephile's moviegoing experience when our very nature is called into question. Are the images of slightly out-of-focus birds cut with the roar of rolling waves really a profound metaphor for life, or rather a contrite way to interpret the metaphors of existence? What happens when these images stretch for nearly two and a half hours, and are overlaid with the soft whispering voice over of a woman contemplating such generalities as, "I think of you everyday" or "Why did I lose you?" The effect, some would have, is a profound religious experience, likened to a meditation. Others, it seems, find it a pretentious and unmoving look at life. The judgement is yours, but to the jurors of the Cannes Film Festival a few months ago, Terrence Malik's
Tree of Life reverberated great truths about our human existence -- enough to garnish the coveted Palm D'Or at this year's festival. But the question remains: do we award pretentious cinema based on true merit, or are films like
Tree of Life rewarded in an industry's self-congratulatory reflection of the cinema we have deemed as "profound"?
Tree of Life begins simply enough: a dot of light flashes across the screen. Is it an embryo inside its mother's womb? Or perhaps even a spark of creation; a deity gently coaxing us into existence? Over, we hear a voice whisper into our ear that there are two ways of life: the way of Grace or that of Nature. We are hardly given a chance to breathe before being told that it is Grace that wins out, and we are thrust headfirst down the long and clichéd babble that will be presented at us over the next two hours.
Malik's script, originally a 25 page prose poem, comes across on screen as just that. At times, the images take your breath away, and Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography is truly otherworldly. The images juxtapose National Geographic style explorations to the farthest reaches of our galaxy, along side soft-focused handheld work photographing the beautiful cast (Jessica Chastain is particularly stunning, as are the children, who's effortless acting abilities lend moments of sincere pleasure to the film.) This is a story of death as witnessed through the life of a family, and the certain home-movie aspect of the film deserves credit.
However, the question remains: is this truly a great work of art, or simply a pretentious regurgitation of cinematic techniques that have come before? Art is a fickle beast, to define it is almost to destroy it. But all too often we are faced with a conundrum like Malik's work. The images alone are nothing new, we have seen before the long shot of a bird flying through the sky, the wind whistling through the tree tops, the lone door standing in a harsh desert landscape. We've also seen non-narrative storytelling, such as Malik employs here. Wong Kar-Wai weaves sensuous tales of love and loss without his actors having any idea where the story is going; David Lynch takes us on non-linear journeys into the psyche; and, Lars Von Trier weaves intimate tales of the fallacies of the world around us. Or we can look for answers in the art world: Matthew Barney's or Andy Warhol's "films" that ask us not to approach them as cinema, but rather as fine art, sitting in the theatre for hours and hours having nothing but raw images fly at us. But rarely do we find a film that lies solely in its pretension as this one does. In one particularly bold move, Malik takes us on a 17-minute ride through the creation of the universe, complete with college-level CGI animated dinosaurs roaming the earth. It is masturbatory and unhelpful to a story about the death of a child.
In the end, one must ask oneself what the point of a film like this really is? Are we simply to allow the images and religious voiceovers sink into our psyches and allow ourselves to be changed by them? Or should we hold the candle to the filmmakers feet and demand that we are respected and taken on a ride that allows for us to think for ourselves, rather than being pushed and prodded into watching overwhelmingly cliché images? It is a question that I dare say cannot be answered in one short article, but rather one that demands the highest level of artistic discussion as we continue to create new works that will be rewarded based on their merit, and not solely on their attempts at the profound.
