The Tree of Life: Rooted in experience

“Tell us a story from before we can remember.” This request, posed to his mother by one of the O’Brien boys (the one, in fact, whose death years later marks our dramatic entry point into The Tree of Life), suffuses Terrence Malick’s new work and its elliptical, headlong exploration of memory and meaning. It’s a collage in which narrative causality bends to memory’s errant patterns and the imagination’s serpentine longings. Here we have the young Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) starting a family in Waco, Texas in the 1950s; here we have their eldest son Jack (Sean Penn) as a melancholic businessman in contemporary Houston; here we have Jack as a boy (Hunter McCracken) traipsing through the Waco suburbs with his brothers, drawing comfort from his mother or wishing violence upon his frustrated, disciplinarian father (“Do you love your father?” “Yes, sir.”); here we have fantasies of Mrs. O’Brien defying gravity, encased in a glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty, or mingling on some faraway beach that might resemble heaven, or at least a fleeting notion of one. And here we have interstellar plumes of gas, asteroids silently crashing into planets, light curving into the shape of a flame, and life rising up from the sea. All those things “from before we can remember,” our dreams of prehistory, our invented images of our parents’ childhoods, merge with haunting assemblies of things recalled. Malick’s approach makes no divisions between the present, the past and the deep past, between the living and the dead. You’ll walk away from The Tree of Life recalling the part where Mrs. O’Brien shields her son’s eyes from the man having an epileptic seizure, the part where the kids enjoyed their Halloween parade, or the old man who says, “Good night. We’ll see you in five years.” You’ll feel like there was a whole story somewhere in each of those, and then you’ll go back to see The Tree of Life again and realize that each of those parts was all of about three seconds long. At 67, five films and 40 years into his singular career, Malick has strayed farther from the familiar than ever before, giving us a (semi-autobiographical?) film made of glimpses, reveries, music, and disembodied voices.

It’s those voices, whispered, at times cringingly earnest, that can raise objections, but there’s an irreconcilable tension between voice-over and narrative in Malick’s films going all the way back to Badlands (1973) that’s worth keeping in mind. From The Thin Red Line (1998) on, Malick has complicated his multi-character voice-overs to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to know who to even attribute them to, including characters who’ve died. There’s a case to be made for The Tree of Life being told entirely from Jack’s perspective, though to make that case you need to accept that Jack’s perspective envelops things “from before we can remember,” even that origin-of-the-universe sequence, made in collaboration with legendary special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, and which counters the voice-overs’ creationist overtones with awesome evolutionary imagery (including an exchange between dinosaurs that is for me by far the film’s goofiest risk). The intimate/specific is cast in relief against the infinite/eternal throughout The Tree of Life, so the one-way conversations with god that pervade its soundtrack should be taken as one more source of oppositional elements.

Because so much story and even character development in The Tree of Life is conveyed through the editing, through Jack Fisk's holistic, transporting production design, and through Emmanuel Lubezki’s energized and lyrical Steadicam work, performance is often a matter of gesture and attitude. Mrs. O’Brien is an idealized, ageless, beatific mother, not unlike Tarkovsky's mother figures, so Chastain is, appropriately, a diaphanous presence. Mr. O’Brien, a source of conflict and lingering resentment for Jack, has more to do, and Pitt, who also co-produced the film, is at his best here, free of the strained mannerisms that plague so many of his other films. But the performance that sticks with me most is McCracken’s, with his wounded eyes, jug ears and quiet confusion, who in some of the most engaging sequences gets into trouble with the neighbourhood kids, torments a poor frog, and enters a stranger’s house to touch foreign things and steal a woman’s slip which he guiltily disposes of in a river. McCracken’s Jack is a branch that extends out to become Penn and, it seems, Malick, our reclusive author, facilitator and dreamer, who’s gone so far out on a limb here and yet is still able to climb down, plant his feet on solid ground and perform the cinema’s oldest, most rewarding trick: transmitting a cosmos of feeling and wonder through a single, sensitive, responsive human face.

Inner-life during wartime: The Thin Red Line

It opens with visions of swimming in glaucous waters, rowing out to sea, familial bathing, running a wheel barrel race with the child inhabitants of this mercifully ignored Pacific paradise. But the voice-over narration wonders on the essential duality of man and nature that perpetuates conflict, and soon we’re gearing up for a long and arduous battle. Based on James Jones’ 1962 novel about the taking of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998) is a group portrait of men at war, underpinned by, or more aptly, given an undercurrent of daydream speculation regarding mankind as a single, multifaceted soul. The collective anxiety of these men, most of them young and relatively inexperienced, as they board the carriers that will usher so many of them to their deaths is almost palpable. Time is invested in establishing rank, but when grown men whimper and cry their hierarchies dissolve. We see men shudder with panic, men sick with fear. There are plenty of great war films, but The Thin Red Line, newly available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion, might be the only one I, who’s never been close to a war, relate to so fully. It’s because of its painstaking emphasis on brotherhood, and it’s because of the fear.

This was the first film from the reclusive maverick director Terrence Malick in 20 years, after having made only two films during the decade of the New Hollywood, Badlands (73) and Days of Heaven (78). Only two, yet the both of them immensely memorable and immensely individual. Malick’s return to the movies would be a far bigger production than both of its predecessors combined, yet his signature would remain unmistakable: there would be a lot of voice-over, some of it playing dissonance with the images; there would be earnest philosophical questions, often posed by decidedly credulous characters; sooner or later, something would be set on fire. But the ambitions that separated The Thin Red Line from Malick’s earlier work wouldn’t be confined to questions of scale—this new, older Malick sought to locate his poeticism in collectivity. Butterflies, birds and bats oversee the carnage and ripping of earth. The film sweeps across landscapes to light down upon varied characters and their interior voices, swooping into their consciousness in search of some unuttered emotional truth, so that each of them becomes our protagonist for a time. Yet the film’s protagonist is also some presence beyond the brutal drama unfolding on-screen, some hand guiding the camera, especially when mounted on a crane, soaring through tall grass and the smoke of freshly detonated ordinance, gliding past soldiers running, screaming, being torn to shreds, propelled upward by blasts or standing in stunned silence. The camera itself becomes our narrator, the ghostly observer that brings some supra-natural coherence to so much chaos.

To realize such a sprawling narrative required an enormous and diverse cast; to finance it required stars. So Malick chose to assemble a cast split evenly between knowns and unknowns, with the latter most often playing the larger roles. (It’s astonishing to watch the audition tapes featured on Criterion’s disc and see just how many great actors didn’t make it into the film.) If you were to make a shortlist of your favourite American actors of the last fifteen years or so there’s a good chance you’ll find a couple of them lingering somewhere in the populous canvas of The Thin Red Line. There’s Elias Koteas as the god-fearing, soft-spoken Greek captain. There’s Sean Penn, beginning by this point to look older, calmer. There’s Adrian Brody, his eyes looking wider than his narrow face. There’s John Travolta, with a ridiculous moustache. There’s John Cusack and John Savage. There’s Nick Stahl, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Ben Chaplin. Nick Nolte looms large over the central sequence concerning the taking of a hill that incurs heavy casualties. Nolte quotes Homer though it’s really just to show off. All worked up and phlegmy, his lipless mouth a frightening maw, he narrates the slaughter like a peppy football coach. But we also hear his inner thoughts: “Shut up in a tomb. Can’t lift the lid.” He’s trying to stage manage the whole thing, sculpt the most compelling narrative, the one that’ll ensure his belated promotion.

Closest to embodying a single central character is Jim Caviezel’s Witt, the boyishly handsome, blue-eyed private thrown back into action after going AWOL. A Melanesian woman tells him he “looks army,” but to me he looks like a dreamer. Where the other men remember beautiful women and inviting houses on the other side of the world, Witt’s flashbacks are to the island idyll he was taken from only days earlier. His voice-over speaks about the mystery—or lack there of—of death, and throughout the film Witt personally oversees many deaths, peering into the eyes of his comrades as they meet their demise, driven crazy with terror. He doesn’t seem the macho type, nor dies he seem suicidal. Perhaps he just thinks he’s lucky, because he keeps volunteering for the deadliest tasks. “If something bad happens” he says, “I want to be there.” Maybe he’s Malick’s avatar, which for better or for worse will make him the embodiment of a somewhat glorified naïveté.

“Who are you that lives in all these many forms?” “We. We together. One being.” “Love. Where does it come from?” These shards of reverie that emerge from the chorus of voice-overs—sometimes it’s hard to know who is who—can seem profound or pretentious depending on your mood. Yet by the time you’ve gotten say, half an hour into The Thin Red Line’s 170 minutes, it’s hard to imagine not surrendering to it utterly. It’s a genuine war epic, elegantly staged and chillingly violent, as well as a Tarkovsky-like meditation on nature, and one of the most penetrating and immersive mega-budget movie experiences I can think of. The new sound mix on Criterion’s new edition—at least on the Blu-ray I was able to sample—is particularly enveloping, dynamic in its depth and at times bracing. The overall effect of The Thin Red Line is to leave us by its end feeling as though we’ve been pushed through something, bore witness to something grandiose that only the cinema can offer. We feel closer to a particular vision, at once infernal and beatific, at once helmed by a single and singular artist and the portrayal of a difficult to fathom experience shared by hundreds. There’s almost nothing like it.

Navigating the Milky way: the fertile tension between Gus Van Sant and the gay mainstream

Gus Van Sant and Harvey Milk were always destined to seem either an ideal hook-up or a sort of studio-contrived shotgun wedding. That the most famed and acclaimed openly gay filmmaker in the US should helm the long-in-development biopic about the first openly gay man to herald the gay cause in US politics seems obvious until you start to consider the complicated nature of Van Sant’s previous contributions to gay cinema.

I more or less grew up with Van Sant’s early features, enthralled by their visual poetics and oddball humour, their nipple-twisted Americana and palpable affection for all the world’s lost boys. By the time of My Own Private Idaho Van Sant’s rendering of Portland’s runaway male hustler scene—centered as it was around the tenderly compelling and, it would appear, not so gay River Phoenix—practically made me want to be gay. Van Sant’s gay boys were antiheroes, outlaws, non-conformists, vulnerable adventurers, their sexuality tied directly to their outsider status. I found them cool beyond measure.

But what, by contrast, really matters in the story of Harvey Milk? Today more than ever, the core of Milk’s accomplishment is the very antithesis of Van Sant’s outsider chic. Milk’s bold and perilous first steps as San Francisco city supervisor, his nationally recognized efforts to stake out an unabashedly gay presence in the era of Anita Bryant reactionism, were designed to lead the community into the light of the mainstream, and the recent defeat of gay marriage in California feels like a direct attack on that legacy. To have same-sex partnership legally recognized should be a fundamental right, but such an ethos of normalization should not be confused with the sort of romance or shadow side of gay culture so beguilingly evoked in Mala Noche, Van Sant’s debut, or Idaho.

This tension between sensibilities may explain why, rather than aligning itself to his more experimentally-minded, equally death-haunted quartet of Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park, Milk feels more akin to Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Van Sant’s earlier stabs at multiplex acceptance. Yet I think this is finally a more effective movie than either. Milk needed to be made for the biggest possible audience—to do otherwise would be to miss the entire point of this story—and Van Sant deserves credit for recognizing this. His flexibility as a filmmaker is in my books something to admire.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, the movie is structured around audio recordings Milk made when he began to fear for his life—threats of assassination had been made for some time. It’s a useful convention, allowing us to cut to the chase more often than not, and allowing the voice of Sean Penn, in pleasingly nasal-fey Noo-Yawk, to invitingly guide us in. The movie’s concerned solely with the final eight years or so of Milk’s life, the period that begins with his picking up of the attractive, much younger Scott Smith (James Franco) in an NYC subway station on the night of Milk’s 40th birthday.

Falling love with Smith was the catalyst that allowed Milk to give up his semi-closeted financial sector existence and go west to a rainbow wonderland waiting to erupt from under a blanket of stale conservatism. A Republican and late-blooming hippy of sorts, Milk goes from suited to shaggy, sees opportunities for gay consumers to gain foothold in his new community, and opens a little camera shop on Castro Street. This section of the movie ends with a magnificent crane shot of Milk and Smith necking in broad daylight. It’s glorious, the first crest of a wave of enthrallment over new hopes. It also features a telling detail: as in the subway pick-up scene, Milk is conspicuously positioned below Smith. His affection for his boyfriends tends toward the adulatory.

Smith doesn’t stick around, leaving Milk to exercise his generally poor judgment with regards to lovers, culminating in a disastrous partnership with a needy Chicano played by Diego Luna. But buoyed by San Fran’s brimming gay underground, Milk is already well on his way to triumph and that fateful retribution. His ascent into municipal politics is highly fraught and makes for superb drama. He’s trying always to bond gays together, controversially declaring privacy, ie: the closet, an antiquated luxury in times of violent bigotry. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” was his clever rallying cry. And his charisma is awesome, his arguments persuasive, his sense of populism shrewd—he gained his supervisor position as much through the promise of legislating against abandoned dog shit as through gay rights.

Van Sant collaborates again here with cinematographer Harris Savides, who previously wrought San Francisco in the 70s to great effect in Zodiac. Milk’s dynamic use of archival footage serves it well, making the spirit of the times come alive. But the decisive force in this project, what will make or break it for audiences, are the performances, and Penn is on fire here. The role of Milk grants the volatile actor and activist permission to express his moral fervor in a fresh, invigorating context. He mimics Milk’s peculiar fist shaking with a goofy sort of grace, milking it, so to speak, with great aplomb. He speechifies with great emotional dexterity, yet brings a wonderfully conspiratorial glee to quieter scenes of political negotiation. He’s also very funny. Josh Brolin’s Dan White challenges him with the tired old theological arguments against homosexuality. “Can two men reproduce?” White asks. “No,” Milk replies, with the warmest and slyest of smiles. “But god knows we keep trying.”

In a superlative and teeming supporting cast that includes lovingly realized turns from Franco, very sexy and subtle in his grudging support, and from Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill, Brolin demands special mention. His embodiment of profoundly conflicted homophobia swings from sympathetic to repulsive with an absolute minimum of fuss. In a grim, sobering way he grounds the picture. Which is to say he represents an element that doubtlessly still lingers in Milk’s audience, a prejudice and resentment that can’t be quelled by the comforts of increasing familiarity with gay culture alone. And it’s because of this that I sincerely hope the Dan Whites of the world see this movie.

Los Angeles plays itself, as do Sean Penn and Bruce Willis, in What Just Happened

Ben’s typical day involves a great deal of driving and talking on the phone—he’s an Angelino, don’t you know. He visits ex-wives and drops kids at school. He visits therapists. He speaks with agents, actors, directors, editors and studio higher-ups and exudes a reasonableness with each of them that stands out favorably in a milieu riddled with tantrums, neuroses and stumbling twelve-steppers. He does lunch. He placates, boosts, councils and consoles and when his back’s against the wall, which is often, he negotiates. He also dyes his chest hair, but that hint of desperate inner quirk he does in private. He’s presumably in his 60s, but looks pretty good. He works in the movies, and for all his outer calm, he’s barely hanging on.

Based on a fairly balls-out memoir of long-term mastication within the capricious dental work of Hollywood, What Just Happened finds prolific producer Art Linson, a.k.a. Ben, embodied by prolific actor Robert De Niro, who, as it happens, has starred in numerous Linson-produced projects, including The Untouchables, Heat and Great Expectations. The film also features an “as himself” cameo from Sean Penn, who also starred in several Linson projects, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Casualties of War and We’re No Angels, which co-starred De Niro. Penn’s spouse, Robin Wright Penn, plays De Niro’s ex-spouse and the person he’s still closest to. Catherine Keener, who recently starred in Linson’s Into the Wild, which was directed by Sean Penn, plays De Niro’s boss, a woman of such chilling authority she need never raise her voice. Does it go without saying that Linson produced the film, as well as adapted his own book?

There’s a long, thick history of self-castigating Hollywood comedies featuring actual Hollywood people playing themselves and intermingling with Hollywood actors playing semi-fictionalized Hollywood people. This strategy supplies Sunset Boulevard, to name a particularly sublime example, with some of its richest, most delicious intertextualities. That term sounds highfalutin, but it serves to remind us just how populist postmodernism can be when dealing with household name cultural icons. It also speaks to a cultural segment still sufficiently movie-obsessed to happily pass hours playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. But is this segment obsessed enough, and large enough, to constitute a substantial audience for What Just Happened?

As directed by Barry Levinson—who gave us a far more outrageous self-castigating Hollywood comedy with Wag the Dog—the film probably isn’t castigating enough, or funny enough, or scandalous enough, to reel in the masses. And it’s kind of a shame, because while What Just Happened fizzles in its final act, while many of its satirical targets, no doubt based in actual events, finally feel like clichés, it has many nuanced observations, some terribly, amusingly sad scenes of personal meltdown, and a very well gauged performance from De Niro, who has a knack for playing containment that doesn’t just read as mere resignation. His Ben is a welcome twist on the notion of the all-powerful producer. He is man required to juggle many balls at once, and who might just care about art, too. (Just scan Linson's filmography and you'll see a commitment to less-than crowd-pleasing projects.)

He has a director, played by Toronto-bred Michael Wincott as a manic, strung-out Keith Richards wannabe, who won’t remove a scene of a dog getting shot in the head from his final cut, despite scathing audience previews. “My wife is still crying, asshole!” reads one of the cards. Another simply reads “FUCK YOU!” He has a rabid actor, Bruce Willis, playing himself, who refuses to shave off a burly beard despite threats by the studio to pull the plug on a picture days away from production. The beard thing—will Willis shave? will he at least go down to a goatee? a moustache?—is the film’s main source of suspense. I guess that might not have you gripping your armrests, yet, you know, there’s something sobering, something perversely fascinating, about just how pivotal the presence of the absence of a beard is on the outcome of a multi-million dollar business venture and numerous careers.