Forfeit the eel, O Effete Hitler (and other muddled notes on the tree of life)

Shortly after watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, I discovered that the film’s title can be rearranged to spell “O I left the reef”, “I tether elf foe”, “File other feet”, "O I feel the fret", “Felt heifer toe” and “Feel it thereof”, among other phrases. (Go on, add your own.) All these anagrams are thematically consistent with the film’s content - and how could they not be, given that The Tree of Life encompasses EVERYTHING?

I’m a Malick fan with high tolerance for the massive self-indulgence of his cinema (two earlier posts here and here), but I thought this film was portentous and overblown even by his usual standards. Main gripe: the randomness inherent in taking vignettes from the lives of a specific 1950s American family and placing them against a canvas that tries to accommodate the history of the Universe as well as key questions about existence and consciousness. While the ambition is admirable, a two-hour-long film is scarcely enough to deal with such a subject on the scale that Malick wants to deal with it. (Quite possibly, even a 12-billion-year-long film wouldn’t be enough. Even if we’re living inside it.)
 

Jim Emerson once pointed out that some movies work better when seen in private, because they are too personal to share with an audience. If you watch a film you feel strongly about alongside a bunch of indifferent or critical viewers, it’s a bit like “having other people in the most private recesses of your consciousness, making fun of your dreams as you're dreaming them”.

Malick's films fit this thesis well, and I may have liked Tree of Life better if I had seen it in solitude. But a south Delhi multiplex hall is about as far as you can get from the private viewing experience; within the first 20 minutes, I realised this was going to be an effort to sit through. And though I was irritated by the viewers who knew nothing about Malick and had come to see “a Brad Pitt movie”, I could also feel some sympathy for them.

One such lady was sitting behind me with a companion (whose sex I’m unsure about because he/she didn’t say a word; or maybe the lady was talking to herself throughout). She tried to follow the anti-narrative but eventually took to shifting about in her seat, sighing loudly and flapping her hands like one of those poor tortured trees in Malick’s last film The New World. During the lengthy passage that deals with nothing less than the birth of our solar system, the dawn of single-celled life in the primeval soup, and the gradual appearance of “higher” forms (eventually resulting in the multiplex audiences of today), she said: “I think they must be showing what happens to that guy after his death.”

Not a terrible interpretation really, when you consider how abstract the sequence is (especially for those who haven’t brushed up on their evolutionary biology), and how seemingly unconnected to the 1950s family story. The problem is, she went on saying it even after the dinosaurs appeared. (The Afterlife is Jurassic Park? Who knew.)

And so it went until the lights came on, whereupon some people hooted loudly and others stumbled out of the hall wailing.

Personally I was disappointed too. On one level it’s pleasing that a respected filmmaker – with resources and big-name actors willing to perform cartwheels for him – is going all out to realise a deeply personal, audience-alienating vision. But in this case I didn’t think the vision was worth the effort, the money and the time.

So, zero stars. (And you know I don’t believe in giving marks or stars to a film.) That’s right, a big round zero. Not even a consolatory half a star for nobleness of intention or grandeur of vision.

But would I pay multiplex-ticket money to see The Tree of Life a second time? Yes – in a heartbeat. (Only if I’m assured an empty hall, or at least one with where I wouldn’t be able to hear any boos or chuckles.)

P.S. I don’t spend a lot of time reading film reviews these days, but I made an exception for Tree of Life, because it’s interesting to observe the different ways in which good writers react to Malick’s cinema (and my own responses to those writers are always pleasingly muddled). Of the reviews I’ve read, the one I most agreed with overall was this negative one by Stephanie Zacharek (“Malick’s slavish attention to detail is more a kind of ADD distractibility, where every flickering butterfly passing by, every dust mote dancing in the sun, is supposedly loaded with so much meaning that in the end, nothing has any weight”). At the same time, unlike Zacharek, I admire Malick’s refusal to take an anthropic view of life. (I was puzzled by the critics who complained that The Thin Red Line wasn’t so much a World War II movie as a film about a beautiful island and its flora and fauna, where a few human beings just happened to be busy killing each other. Surely that was a large part of the point.)

Meanwhile, Peter Bradshaw goes magnificently, shamelessly over the top about The Tree of Life in this review, and I liked the fact that Roger Ebert looked at the film largely through the prism of his own childhood memories of growing up in a 1950s Middle America very similar to the one depicted here. (I can completely see why someone with a life trajectory similar to that of the Sean Penn character might have intensely personal feelings about this film.)

And from Andrew O’Hehir’s ambivalent piece in Salon, a good summation:

We are here, living and dying on this little blue rock in the middle of space, mesmerized by the mysterious relationships between parents and children that define our lives, connected at every point – a tree we plant, an animal we feed, the earth we dig in, the thoughts we think – to something much larger we can't really understand. Trying to get at some of that in a 2011 movie-star vehicle that cost many millions of dollars to make, and is partly an autobiographical family story and partly an indecipherable spiritual allegory – well, that's nuts. Right now I suspect that "The Tree of Life" is pretty much nuts overall, a manic hybrid folly with flashes of brilliance. But even if that's true it's a noble crazy, a miraculous William Butler Yeats kind of crazy, alive with passion for art and the world, for all that is lost and not lost and still to come.