Film Review - The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is a miracle, a picture consumed by the wonder, amazement and beauty of life that surely feels as personal to its creator, writer and director Terrence Malick, as it does to so many of the people who have left the theatre moved and haunted by its power.

Watching the film on opening night in Austin with a packed audience (many of whom worked in some capacity on the film, which was shot in Smithville), it was not unlike taking in the grand spectacle of The Lion King on Broadway for the first time as a young child. It is an overwhelmingly emotional experience.

How many people will see this film and watch in awe as memories of their own childhood flash before their eyes? I know I did. The story concerns Jack, an eleven year-old boy raised in Texas in the 1950s whose wondrous and carefree childhood slowly gives way to a more troubling, complicated understanding of human nature as he loses his innocence. You can see where I might find some similarities (as long as we’re swapping the 1950s for the 1990s). As he grows into a disillusioned adult (Sean Penn), he struggles to come to terms with the two ways through life: the way of human nature, fierce will and determination, epitomized by his father (Brad Pitt, in a hauntingly understated performance); and the way of love, compassion and grace, epitomized by his mother (Jessica Chastain).

But Malick’s movie extends back to the beginning of time, offering us beautiful sequences depicting the creation of the world that call to mind similar scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I’ve often wondered how audiences would respond to 2001 if that film were released in theaters today. The answer has come. Our generation now has our own 2001 – a mystifying, extraordinarily ambitious epic that forgoes narrative filmmaking almost entirely. But as film critic Roger Ebert notes in his review of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey “[lacks] Malick’s fierce evocation of human feeling” present in The Tree of Life. Indeed, this is a film driven by small, powerful human moments. Pitt, Chastain and Penn’s performances are oftentimes completely wordless, but they linger in the mind days after having seen the picture. As much as I love Kubrick’s film, the same cannot be said for its characters.

This is a film that requires patience and respect for Malick’s vision. There were boos and hisses from some audiences when 2001 was first released in 1968, and The Tree of Life has received similar reactions (even at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or). But these are films that live beyond their audiences, masterpieces that aren’t easily digestible for the masses.

I’ve seen the film twice now, and both times the ending – a glimpse of everyone in Penn’s life coming together and journeying together to a sort of afterlife – is equal parts beguiling and soul-stirring. I left The Tree of Life full of hope – not just spiritual hope, or the hope of someday understanding all things – but hope for the future of cinema.

I Think This Just Might Be My Masterpiece

Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is quite possibly the best film Tarantino has ever directed, even when considering his masterpiece Pulp Fiction (1994), which is one of my favorite films of all time, and the absolutely brilliant Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill Volume One and Two (2003, 2004). After catching the 11:30 AM screening with my girlfriend Anne and her brother Jamie, I tried to pinpoint the last time I felt such unadulterated joy and cinematic delight while watching a movie.

The excitement of watching The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) for the first time comes to mind, but I don't think I've really seen something with the same raw energy and gleeful excitement found in Inglorious Basterds since Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006). I saw The Departed five times in theaters alone; something tells me I'll be going back to see Inglorious Basterds again.

Christoph Waltz, who plays the despicable yet oddly fascinating Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, has his name written on this year's Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (after winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for his incredible performance). Tarantino's labyrinth screenplay, which introduces and employs dozens of memorable characters, is only partially devoted to the tale of the Basterds, the Jewish-American rogue soldiers on a mission to kill and scalp every Nazi they can find in France. Instead of filming a traditional revenge movie, Tarantino has made a distinctly European picture full of fascinating, three-dimensional characters who are the unsuspecting stars of a spaghetti-western-turned-war picture.

Tarantino holds back on the relentless violence his younger audiences will certainly crave, in favor of a terrificly-written series of events in which characters meet each other, discuss film and play games, and are eventually subject to very brief outbreaks of violence. It's not that different from the structure of Pulp Fiction (although Inglorious Basterds is told in chronological order).

Brad Pitt has impressed me once again as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the head of the Jewish Basterds, with a thick Southern accent and a serious problem with the Nazi Party. Pitt's performance is both wildly comical and seriously frightening; it's worth noting that Pitt has given brilliant performances in uniformly superb movies for the past few years, including Babel (2006, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik), Burn After Reading (2008, Joel and Ethan Coen) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, David Fincher). Bravo to actors like Pitt and George Clooney who use their star power to make bold and daring films.

Costars Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Til Schweiger and even Mike Myers deliver excellent performances in the scenes which ultimately lead to the inevitably blood-soaked finale, in which the Jewish people get their revenge against the Nazi Party at the film premiere of a German propaganda movie.

Aside from writing and directing one of the most entertaining and joyous odes to cinema ever put onscreen, Tarantino has also crafted a film that is a rumination on the wonderful power of cinema to destroy evil forces and change the course of history. If there's a better message to be found in a motion picture this year, I'd like to hear about it.

With apologies to Public Enemies (Michael Mann) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), Inglorious Basterds is the best film I've seen this year. To hell with the fact that Tarantino has rewritten history - I think this just might be his masterpiece.

Tomorrow I will write about my extreme disgust regarding Paramount Pictures' decision to move the release date of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island from October 2nd to next February. Martin Scorsese is my man, and I don't appreciate this release date change (unless, of course, Scorsese himself requested the change). The absence of Shutter Island in this year's fall movie calendar leaves me without much investment in any of the other new releases this fall (other than Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, and Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man). Perhaps Inglorious Basterds will remain as my #1 film of the year, after all.