(no subject)

[proximoception]

Tree of Life has a truly great movie in it but overall isn't one - I kind of want to find someone who hasn't seen it and just play Jack's life, from infancy to leaving his first house, and see what they think. The idea content ('reconciling' grace and nature, analogized in the '50s-ish parents, and redefined as what's beautiful and what's selfish or brutal in natural processes, I guess) was kind of foggy and drifty and the attempted visionary ending just annoying - and somehow religious? Who can even tell.

I liked the space stuff but I'm not sure how well it was integrated. He was going for approximately this progression: 'how can we love a god that destroys us' to 'but this isn't god, it's burning shifting dispersing congealing gases as old as time' to a 'but part of these became our mom and we love her, and even the other part though crueler seems to teach us something, and is inside us, and anyway it's not its fault it's like that' reconciliation, and that's cool and all, but step #3 by replaying a large chunk of everyone's childhood threw a bowling ball onto the glassware of the unfolding argument, a bowling ball more real and beautiful than any argument. And oddly one that made that argument rather better in merely human terms - how to be good, rather than how to forgive god.

(And then Sean Penn meander-staggered us into the unfortunate rest of it, from which a couple images are saveable, but in general it was just the New World Malick drifting around in the wilderness with a confused actor and steadicam finding truth in leaf-breakings of light the whole weekend.)

(Having things pass back and forth in front of the sun constantly is something he should have been cautioned about, also. That shit gets oppressive even when you're making an interesting point with it.)

Annoyance at all that shouldn't overshadow deep, extensive praise of the long middle, which is to my mind by far the best thing Malick's done - really startlingly great and lovely. As was Brad Pitt, surprisingly.

Comments

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i think the obstacle is creating your phantom edit, not so much the finding of people like me who've yet to see it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think the bluray chapter breakdown creates my edit for me - and be sure to see it on bluray or in a theater when you do, it's one of the few movies where that really matters. But if it's bluray maybe just hit stop after there's clear closure to the Pitt et al. portion and catch the rest another day.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

"...drifting around in the wilderness with a confused actor and steadicam finding truth in leaf-breakings of light the whole weekend..." That's pretty great. I liked some of that movie, too, though.

In The Thin Red Line, the Witt character did keep finding truth in leaf-breakings of light, but that partly had to do with how uncanny that beauty was in a war movie. Not just that you knew the movie would turn violent again (the world would turn violent again) but that the character who dreamed those truths was somehow in contradiction with his world, the world of war and soldiering and obeying. (Though not politically opposed to war, to all war or this war.) -- There's none of that tension in the Penn character's relation to his hazily sketched glass-tower-world; he seems to find it maybe boring, or unworthy, but he doesn't ache with the wrongness of it. The way Witt does.

Or maybe that's not it. In The Thin Red Line, the bombs will kill the lovely island mothers and children, and the horrors war sort of kill them for Witt anyway, revealing them to be just as petty and mean as anyone else. So the leaf-breakings are fragile, temporary, capable of being ruined. Whereas Penn & Malick have got an endless footage-making weekend of those moments.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I liked Thin Red Line a lot, mostly for the reasons you put so well, and The New World I liked conceptually, and even the light effects, but it desperately needed cutting. But I have a terrible attention span, so I speak only for that group.

Julie said about the misguided parts of Tree of Life that it was the sort of thing that justified the average person's hatred of art films - where it was impossible to tell if what you were seeing was way above your head or legitimately unintelligible. It's not pleasant to not know whether you're an idiot or the victim of others' idiocy.

I'm presenting on Hershel Parker's editorial theory tomorrow - he collaborated on a conservative critical edition of Melville's Pierre and then later made a maverick edition cutting the whole Pierre-as-failed-novelist subplot that Melville added as a response to Moby-Dick's relative failure, which devastated him. Parker wasn't working from an earlier manuscript, he just removed all the paragraphs detailing or mentioning Pierre's career! On grounds of unity of intention - holding that as more important than the artist's later changes of mind. I hope someone finds a way to hack Tree against Malick's will on similar grounds someday, though for all I know he wanted it laid out this way from the start. Maybe the 'remix' license we're getting used to in pop music can be reapplied to movies?