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.

"When you strip away enough manmade elements, places take on this grandiosity...": Ryan Redford on Oliver Sherman

Sherman Oliver (Garret Dillahunt) was shot in the head in an unnamed war. He survived, yet sustained a severe brain injury. During the months he was hospitalized he thought his name was Oliver Sherman because he couldn’t understand that his paperwork addressed him last name first. Everything in his life seems backward now. The first we see of him in Oliver Sherman isn’t his face but the back of his head, the hair close-cropped so his scar remains visible. Sherman tracks down Franklin (Donal Logue), the solider who saved his life, at his rural home. In the seven years since they last saw each other Franklin got a job, married Irene (Molly Parker), and had kids. Sherman became a drifter and an alcoholic. He’s polite and unassuming, but it’s unclear how long he’s planning to stay with Franklin and his family, or what he plans to do besides taking Franklin out drinking every night. Based on Rachel Ingalls’ short story ‘Veterans,’ Oliver Sherman chronicles a troubled friendship between two vets. They weren’t really friends when they served together, but now seem inextricably bound by a shared trauma.

Oliver Sherman is the feature debut of writer/director Ryan Redford and is remarkably assured. Neither a word nor an image is wasted. Every scene accumulates in quiet portent, buoyed by immaculate performances from the three leads and the dusky photography of In the Bedroom’s Antonio Calvache. The story recalls Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner, though Oliver Sherman also reminded me of Frankenstein: it concerns a sort of monster, stitched together yet somehow incomplete, who never asked for his life and now roams the earth, fundamentally apart from the civilized world, resembling other men yet never quite succeeding at assimilating their ways. (The only significant flaw in Oliver Sherman is that several characters’ don’t seem to catch on to the rather obvious fact that Sherman is severely mentally impaired.) This is one of the strongest Canadian films of recent years and deserves far more attention than it’s received since its premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. It’s now available on DVD from Mongrel Media.

writer/director Ryan Redford

Redford first heard of Ingalls’ Times Like These, the collection that featured ‘Veterans,’ when it was published in 2005, but it wasn’t until after he’d spent four years developing what he thought would be his first feature, “a strange, violent western” that proved too ambitious and costly, that he came across the book and devoured ‘Veterans’ in one sitting. It wasn’t obviously cinematic, but possessed a “timeless, mythic element” that was right up Redford’s alley. “‘Veterans’ addressed these big life and death themes,” Redford explains, “the validity of violence, how one goes about becoming a proper citizen, and how difficult that can be.”

I spoke with Redford last February.

JB: I’m uncertain where this originates from culturally, but watching Oliver Sherman I kept thinking about this old notion that when you save someone’s life you assume responsibility for it.

Ryan Redford: I think it’s Japanese.

JB: This seems to be at the heart of Franklin’s dilemma, his wondering if saving Sherman was a good deed or a kind of curse.

RR: That and the feeling that under slightly different circumstances he might have wound up like Sherman. For all Franklin knew Sherman might have died after they last saw each other, so when he shows up seven years later there’s this shock and horror that Franklin was the cause of this man’s fractured existence.


JB: Place plays an interesting role in Oliver Sherman. Do you come from a rural community?

RR: Not really. My family moved us from Vancouver to Aurora, Ontario when I was 16. I lived there for five or six years and in that time Aurora went from being fairly rural to increasingly developed, with Starbucks, Blockbusters, and strip malls. But I’d always found myself drawn to Andrew Wyeth paintings. I like that poetic something that untouched environments have. When you strip away enough manmade elements, places take on this grandiosity that’s always appealed to me.

JB: Are there rural films that serve as touchstones for you?

RR: I’m not comparing this movie to anything of his in any way, but an obvious source of inspiration is Terrence Malick’s films. Malick has this very formal approach, very grounded in nature…

JB: And very philosophical.

RR: Yeah, there’s something mythic to his movies. I also had the crew watch Andrei Zvyaginstev’s The Return, just to get them in the right frame of mind.

JB: Oliver Sherman doesn’t concern itself with connective geography. We’re either at this very vulnerable looking house surrounded by fields and woods, a small, cramped public library, or this womb-like bar with no women, but there’s no sense of how these places fit together geographically.

RR: I hate establishing shots. I like big landscapes. I like pretty pictures. I hate starting in wide and then getting closer and closer. There’s something pleasingly disorienting about starting a scene and not knowing where you are. Only at the end of a scene will I maybe cut to a wide to finish it and underscore the isolation.


JB: The lack of orientation gave the film this vaguely dreamlike quality that seems to mirror Sherman’s experience of the world, given his cognitive deficiencies.

RR: I’m not always so wild about reflecting what’s going on with the character in the compositions, but I realize there are many shots where I’m making Sherman tiny and solitary within the frame. So I guess sometimes I was doing that on purpose. So much of the storytelling has to do with withholding, so maybe that’s part of it too.


JB: Can you say something about your decision to withhold a key act of violence?

RR: I don’t think we see any acts of violence in the film, but they’re alluded to. Some would argue that showing that scene you’re referring to might have provided more of a punch in the gut, but I always thought it would be too over the top in this kind of restrained, quiet movie.

JB: I think there are ways you could have pulled it off, but it would have supplied a catharsis inappropriate for that point in the story. It’s also nice that we only later discover what exactly happened after the fade to black.

RR: I think you’re right.

JB: There’s a photograph in Franklin’s house of a horse’s eye that seems to be keeping watch over he action. It caught my eye because by isolating the eye the horse seems so spooked, and because Sherman’s relationship with animals, whether its the barking dog he spits on or his story about how to kill a fox, seems antagonistic and important to the story.

RR: That was the production designer. I was initially resistant to it. I don’t like having art on walls in my movies. I don’t like referencing other artists. I don’t like art that’s supposed to be metaphorical. I concede that it is a pretty unsettling image, but I can’t take credit for it.


JB: What about the music box playing that Beethoven piano sonata?

RR: I was just searching for something with the right rhythm, given how we’d cut it. I’d seen The Man Who Wasn’t There recently…

JB: I was going to ask you about that. Once you’ve seen that movie it’s hard to forget that tune.

RR: Yeah, and it just happened to be on this sound effects collection. I’d hated everything I’d heard until that point, and then I saw that movie on TV at 1.00 in the morning, tried it out, and it worked. We were actually going to replace it forever but never got around to it.

JB: The film has such a distinct sensibility. Were there certain elements that you wanted in your first feature regardless of what the story or genre was going to be?

RR: My friends make fun of me for it, but every one of my shorts—and I made plenty of them—had this timeless element and these rural settings, a sort of displaced or lyrical version of reality. So I’m sure that when I was reading stories and looking for adaptable material that I had that aesthetic I’d developed in the back of my mind. Having said that, I think it might be time to branch out a little. Oliver Sherman was the period at the end of that sentence, so to speak.

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.

2000s: the decade in debuts

What follows was co-authored my friend and Vue Weekly colleague Brian Gibson, who's been hard at work since the start of 2009 on surveying the decade's movies in a variety of ways. Thanks to Brian for suggesting this piece... not to mention tracking down all those clips!

The Return

From the evidence of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s first film, The Return (2003), winner of the Golden Lion, there’s a lot to hope for. An astonishing debut with an ominousness as chilly as the lake the two boys and their father cross near the film’s end (tragically, one of the young actors in the film drowned in another lake nearby soon after the film was shot), The Return, shot by Mikhail Krichman, is a little like a small-scale Russian epic if it were made by Terrence Malick. From the beginning, Zvyagintsev manages to combine a curiously restrained visual flair (especially with nature shots) with a uniquely paced rhythm of seething psychological suspense, perhaps filtered from his own experience—his father disappeared when he was six. His next film, The Banishment (07), adapted from a novel by William Saroyan, received more mixed reviews, but has yet to appear here, even on disc, while a segment for New York, I Love You that he directed was cut but will appear on the DVD. Will the incredibly bright light of his debut become more dimly diffused in the coming years? (BG)

Syndromes and a Century

I still haven’t seen most of the work of prolific Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and very likely neither have you. But just speak these titles aloud: Mysterious Object at Noon (00), Blissfully Yours (02), Worldly Desires (04), Tropical Malady (04). The spell begins even before the lights go down—we are in the hands of one of those rare artists who recognize the movies as a medium perfectly fit for such things as sensuality, eros, fecundity, mystery, and, indeed, bliss. Syndromes and a Century (06), which Brian reviewed, rooted in the story of the director’s parents and their early careers as physicians in a semi-rural Thai hospital, seemed ripe for a breakthrough, but it seems we still need to wait for the right conditions to allow Apichatpong’s vision to reach a wider audience—Syndromes didn’t even play domestically in Thailand due to Apichatpong’s refusal to cut scenes for the national censors. (JB)

The Taste of Others

After working with co-writer and husband Jean-Pierre Bacri on scripts for others, Agnès Jaoui set them off on their own in 2000 with her directorial debut, The Taste of Others (clips and an interview with Jaoui can be found at 25:05 of this Charlie Rose episode). Apart from the awkwardly translated title, this is an utterly smooth, slow-building comedy of, well, not manners so much as discrimination—discriminating tastes and class assumptions. Jaoui and Bacri’s great skill lies in turning us away from the most obviously flawed and hypocritical characters to make us see how everyone in the film is unconsciously compromising themselves (including the characters she plays). Jaoui happens to reveal Woody Allen as a pale shadow of his former self in her light, yet unblinkingly honest, examinations of upper-middle-class self-absorption, as further proven by her second film, Look At Me. Her third, Let’s Talk About The Rain, has yet to be released over here, though it’s already screened in Europe. (BG)

Half-Nelson

On this side of the Atlantic, another partnership had a stunning debut in the 2000s. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck wrote 2006’s Half Nelson, with Fleck directing the tale of an inner-city school teacher, Dan Dunne. Ryan Gosling anchored the film as Dunne, but Shareeka Epps was just as good as Drey. Next came the even more understated Sugar (08), carefully studying a Dominican ballplayer trying to make it to the big leagues. Boden and Fleck are ingenious at offering a kind of unassuming-ness in their films, simply slipping into small, everyday situations and then tweaking them ever so slightly for a taut dramatic narrative. Half Nelson was more carefully scripted, especially its tender playing with pairs throughout the film, and more viscerally grounded in one place. But between the two of them, and their two films, Fleck and Boden show all the makings of at least two more superb films in the next decade. (BG)

The Holy Girl

At the time of writing, I’ve seen one utterly mesmerizing, unforgettable movie and one pretentious, self-absorbed piece of twaddle from Lisandro Alonso—Los Muertos (04) and Fantasma (06), respectively—so I’m reluctant to comment on whether Argentina has two new filmmakers deserving of the title of the decade’s best new directors**, but I don’t hesitate for a moment to say she has at least one in Lucrecia Martel. Martel’s breakthrough was The Holy Girl (04), and this may still be her undisputed masterpiece—so far. That movie, which I wrote about upon its Canadian release, placed a mother and daughter in a hotel where a medical convention is being held and one of the guests is making advances on both. The daughter blurs normally separate notions of what constitutes a vocation, and her religious and sexual education fuse into a deliciously strange and often quirkily humorous drama. La Ciénaga (01) and The Headless Woman (08) are more overtly linked to one another in that both are immersed in the daily lives of upper-middle-class Argentine families and the gulf that exists between their lifestyles and perceptions and those of the indigenous people who often work as their appallingly underappreciated servants. These are stories characterized by humour and haunting dreamlike episodes, interrupted by death and prompting questions of responsibility. (JB)

Silent Light

Amores Perros (00) launched the Mexican decade with an adrenaline shot of urban desperation, a tripartite weave of neo-pulp fictions that imposed poetic unity on the disparate socioeconomic subsections of the country’s teeming capital. Yet a decade and two features later, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut now looks far less significant either historically or artistically than Carlos Reygadas’ Japón (02), in which a middle-aged man leaves Mexico City behind in search of some remote place to end his life, a journey that finds him communing with the elderly and magnetic lady of the mountains, Magdalena Flores. It says a lot about Reygadas’ peculiar vision that, even while wearing his influences on his sleeve—the overall approach to narrative and mise en scène in Japón leans heavily on both Tarkovsky and Kiarostami, while Reygadas’ use of actors is clearly indebted to Bresson—his films remain absolutely singular, mysterious, and beguilingly incomplete, each leaving the viewer with numerous puzzling questions. Teetering on the edge of the thriller genre with its story of high-class prostitutes and child kidnapping, the very strangely erotic, image-laden and politically charged Battle in Heaven (05) was an even more provocative and adventurous follow-up, while Silent Light (07), which sensitively chronicled a love triangle set amidst Chihuahua’s Mennonite community, found Reygadas already producing work of the sort of maturity we associate with artists entering the autumnal phase of their careers. (JB)

George Washington

There’s still a case to be made for David Gordon Green as the American decade’s most funky, distinctive, and resolutely innocent, indigenous new voice. If you have a hard time figuring out how to place the sweetly sublime rural reveries of George Washington (00) with the stoner bromance hi-jinx of Pineapple Express (08), you probably haven’t spent enough time with either movie. Green’s voice, however employed, is pretty unmistakable. Green’s career—the previously mentioned titles were bridged by youthful romance in All the Real Girls (02), “Deliverance for kids” in Undertow (03), and wintry small town despair in Snow Angels (08)—consistently encircles commercial viability while never quite embracing unabashed populism. With George Washington—still his most personal and wondrous film—critics had pegged Green as the wide-eyed inheritor of ’70s transcendentalist Terrence Malick’s always almost-aborted career, but the real question now seems to be whether Green is going to settle instead for being the new Michael Ritchie. There was always something of The Bad News Bears (76) imbuing Green’s strongly regionalist sensibility—which isn’t necessarily bad news at all. (JB)

Shotgun Stories

Arkansas native Jeff Nichols showed his own remarkable maturity, developed through six short films, with his feature debut. Just 26 when he wrote and directed Shotgun Stories, in 2004, it was produced by none other than David Gordon Green and released in 2007. The film reinvents the cliché of Southern revenge, sliding into the pickup’s passenger seat alongside a small town’s working class before retribution skids out. The South’s a place of almost self-suffocating, low-level tension here, its folk struggling to get on in spots and corners stripped of much opportunity. Nichols looks to continue his run of talent with Goat, from a script by Green. (BG)

Down in the Valley

Californian David Jacobson hit the Midwest in 2002 with his second film, Dahmer, effectively his debut after the little-seen Criminal (94). A remarkably unsensational look at the notorious serial killer, the film entered the creepy ordinariness of the man’s job and city (Milwaukee) and featured Jeremy Renner as Dahmer, slipping away from all sense of himself with every murder. It’s a film that soars beyond its seamy subgenre. Edward Norton then starred for Jacobson in Down in the Valley, a fascinating Western take on Taxi Driver that reworks the American-rebel film, even in this scene, where ingénue meets cowboy. This new take on old tropes mirrors the mix of freshness and revisionism that infuse Jacobson’s work, tinged as they are with loss and hope, nostalgia and anger, with looking back but trying to always get ahead. (BG)

** Okay, the night after I wrote this I saw Liverpool (08), Alonso's most recent film. It's absolutely beautiful, and that makes two points for Argentina!

What remains: The Road

The images that open The Road feature a leaf-lined branch warmed by the sun. Somewhere nearby stands a beautiful mother-to-be. Observing her is a handsome man stroking a horse. These fragments of a becalmed pastoral paradise are fleeting, vanishing as that same man wakes from his memory-laden dream. A handful of years have passed, perhaps seven, judging from the age of the boy who accompanies him, but the man appears to have aged decades, his face lined with grime-streaked gutters, his teeth half-rotted. Still, his transformation is nothing compared to that of the world he inhabits. The topography resembles a five-day beard on a wretched old man. Fires line the horizon, the sky’s an endless gloaming, and the colour green has forsaken us. Food is scarce, earthquakes are frequent, and what’s left of mankind has largely been reduced to foraging ghouls. At least there are still books. The man reads one to the boy. It catalogues animals, each of which is now presumed extinct.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are making their way south, on foot, in beat-to-shit puffy coats, with dwindling supplies and a revolver with two bullets left, just enough to ensure double-suicide should some horrendous murder suddenly become a certainty. Those aching memories of fecund nature and familial blossoming are the last vestiges of warmth and beauty available to them, though the dying landscapes they pass through possess an undeniable fascination, at least for those of us just visiting for a couple of hours. The most commonplace items become miraculous here: shampoo, Coke, toothpaste, a can of pears. Their magic is intensified by the boy’s first-ever discovery of their comforts—he was born into this. The preservation of his innocence is all the man lives for, his answer to the question of why go on. His wife opted for suicide, along with most people with sense or dignity.

The book is from Cormac McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Like No Country, The Road is a kind of western, the man with no name charged with chaperoning the boy through lawless terrain, their destination being the Gulf Coast and its vague promise of less hostile conditions for homesteading. Like the Coen Brothers’ film of No Country, The Road, scripted by Joe Penhall, is an unusually faithful literary adaptation, and director John Hillcoat, who last helmed The Proposition, easily one of the best westerns of the decade, offers a realization of McCarthy’s post-apocalypse that’s richly detailed, surprisingly suspenseful, and hauntingly vivid. A notable difference between the films of No Country and The Road however is that where the Coens nurtured atmosphere with an uncharacteristic paucity of scoring and voice-over, Hillcoat’s enlisted his old friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to supply the scoring, which is gorgeously mournful, so evocative as to be a sort of adaptation in itself. The problem being that there’s so much of it. Along with Mortensen’s weary voice-over—the pairing of disembodied voice and music recalls the films of Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line in particular—the hypnotic score lulls us during scenes where we should ideally be alert to the tiniest, most nuanced sound, gesture, and image. It’s hardly the worst problem for a movie to have—an abundance of something beautiful and well crafted—but it does finally swath everything in a single tone, unintentionally protecting us from some harrowing moments.

Yet his central reservation of mine felt less important upon my second viewing of The Road, which allowed me to better forget the source material and focus more on the tremendous emotional connection between the brilliantly-cast Mortensen and the very natural, wide-eyed Smit-McPhee. During the second half I realized how, beneath the unfathomably bleak milieu, The Road is finally a story about father and son, about what a parent lives for and what a child tries to retain as he carries on alone. The accumulation of moments of desperate searching and running, of laughter and play—rare, but memorable—and of mutual learning about how to negotiate with the unruly world becomes resonant, and unforgettably moving. So see The Road, and then, perhaps, see it again. There’s something precious amidst all that darkness.

Dancing to the end of love: Bright Star

The opening credits hover over a close-up of needle going through fabric. The image speaks to the diligence and nimbleness needed to craft clothes, poetry or prolonged, unconsummated desire. It also lets us know that Bright Star will diligently hunker down for the worm’s-eye view should it yield another sharpened physical detail for writer/director Jane Campion to weave into this tapestry-like romance, something best surrendered to as with a current. Just lie on your back and watch the patterns unfold.

John Keats died young, and if his poetry went woefully underappreciated during his life at least it was redeemed by the not easily earned devotion of its muse. Bright Star, though inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography, isn’t about Keats. It doesn’t burn much celluloid trying to turn writerly brooding or hand-numbing penmanship into cinema. Its protagonist is instead young middleclass seamstress Fanny Brawne, the first girl in all of Hamstead Heath to have a triangular pleated mushroom collar. When she first meets Keats—the year is 1818—she challenges the reverence aimed at the poet’s vocation, championing handsome, useful, innovative and well-made clothing over delicate words of limited practical power. The antagonism between Fanny (Abbie Cornish) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) is kept honest through the ubiquity of Keats sidekick Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a Scottish poet as big, burly and gruff as Keats was elfin, diminutive and soft-spoken. Their intriguingly un-straightforward triangle is just one of many forces working against the fulfillment of Fanny and Keats, another being Keats’ poverty. But as imagined here, theirs was a love emboldened by ceaseless tension. The film’s vivacity is the product of a harmonious collaboration between sensitive camerawork, production design, scoring and actors, at least one of whom giving the first outstanding work of what promises to be an outstanding career.

Cornish’s performance is of the sort where you can’t decide whether it’s a case of a role being perfectly cast or whether the actor’s invested the role so generously with some secret culled from within that she’s made alternate interpretations unthinkable. That confusion of unfamiliar and overwhelming emotions that clutches youth can be read in Cornish’s face and distracted hands especially. Imperious and anxious, she has the sort of face that when directed at you makes you uncertain if her gaze is one of derision or desire. What isn’t ambiguous is that you have her complete attention. Complimenting Cornish, Whishaw picks up where his Dylan-via-Rimbuad in I’m Not There left off, every smile teasing, every adoring glance half-misted over with the young poet’s inclination to admire Beauty in general as to recognize it in the specifics of his lover’s person. It works very well, while Schneider seems to growing into himself as an actor more and more—he’s more suited to this sort of bullying and jealous dreamer than he was to the agonized young lover in All the Real Girls.

So our stars are exceptional in their roles as young lovers, leaving us with the more difficult question of whether or not this sort of young love translates into exceptional movies, a question Bright Star doesn’t easily resolve. It seems perfectly unconcerned with the proscribed meter of classical storytellng, but the rhythm it adopts instead is almost unintentionally lulling, swerving from bliss to ennui, going up and down with young love’s customary tumult. The film possesses no shortage of moments sublime or nearly so, but these moments don’t add up to a great deal of momentum. So be it. Swooning heights of beauty and feeling trump structural rigour, and that’s fine by me.

What Campion excels at here is fidelity to the subjective experience of her characters, which requires both the acknowledgement of societal limitations—such as the presumptions made by Brown and others that young women are poorly fit to comprehend poetry—and a way of evoking sensuality that embraces the transcendental. In dealing with the latter challenge, Bright Star seems to share a certain kinship with the films of Terrence Malick, The New World most especially, not only because of its star-crossed period romance but because of its grounding in the celebration of nature found in poetry. Chalk it up to mimetic license: a poetic movie about poetry, and one teeming with loveliness.

Bring us your huddled masses: Emanuele Crialese ushers us toward the Golden Door

The original Italian title for writer/ director Emanuele Crialese’s most recent work was Nuovo- mondo, but the film began circulating festivals in 2006, only months after the release of Terrence Malick’s The New World. Presumably re-titled so as to avoid being confused with Malick’s atmospheric masterwork, Nuovomondo was ultimately released, in English-speaking countries at least, as Golden Door. The shift, however frustrating it may have been for the filmmakers, was ultimately fortuitous: Crialese’s follow-up to Respiro is a work at once grounded in carefully detailed history and strangely elevated by a sense of grand mystery. Its characters, most of them Italian peasants, embark on a journey to early 20th century America as pilgrims undertaking a journey of mystical significance. The New World they move toward, which is rumoured to yield vegetables the size of horses and trees that grow money, indeed beacons them like some utopian portal made of precious materials. And Crialese’s simultaneously beguiling and terrifying vision of their movement is suitably poetic, intoxicated with the immigrant’s persistent optimism.

With the exception of westerns and their later counterpart, the road movie, travel, the actual movement from one geographical space to another, has traditionally been compressed in movies, forsaken in favour of depicting the destination. But what was once conveyed through a fleeting image of a broken line working its way across a map is itself the very subject of much of Golden Door. Like millions of others, journeying to the New World for poor Sicilian farmer Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato, nearly unrecognizable from his memorable turn in Respiro) and his family represents an act of faith and will ultimately result in their being basically torn apart. From the opening images of Salvatore and his eldest son climbing a rocky hillside with stones in their mouths, hoping to receive answers from God as to what to do with their frustrated lives, there’s an immediate sense that adventure and necessity collaborate in this realm, however uneasily. To dream of a new life in a new place requires tremendous sacrifice as well as tremendous imagination.

The themes of Golden Door might sound severe, even miserable, but Crialese’s approach to Salvatore’s story is in fact graceful, enigmatic, often warmly humorous and frequently spectacular. There’s a magnificent moment when we see masses of Italians huddled tightly from overhead before a great metallic groan begins to pull them apart, a widening stretch of sea water opening between them like an abyss. Once the ship Salvatore and his family boards sets sail, Crialese’s imagery becomes strikingly divided into smooth lateral pans aboveboard, where passengers in their finest suits attempt to maintain a civilized comportment, and unstable hand-held camerawork below, where the passengers are divided by gender and sleep in claustrophobic proximity to one and other. At the film’s mid-point, all of these passengers will be tossed about like fish in the belly of a giant steel whale and Crialese’s camera stays there with them, their cries of panic the only sounds to rise above the crashing of waves beyond.

Whatever mortal havoc the emigrants survive (and, sadly, some don’t) can hardly prepare them for what awaits once they reach the fog-enshrouded Ellis Island. US Immigration officials, considering themselves enlightened by the pseudo-science of Eugenics, run their applicants through countless inane tests to make sure that their citizenry will not suffer contamination from any sub-standard foreign genes. Single women meanwhile must undergo the sometimes humiliating, often surprising ritual of accepting marriage proposals from complete strangers hoping to purchase a wife. Some of these encounters are absolutely heartbreaking, yet others, like the contract agreed upon between Salvatore and the bewitchingly modern Englishwoman with the mysterious past he met onboard (Charlotte Gainsbourg, sporting a red mane that makes her look like an exotic bird), are utterly charming. Rife with anxiety, but charming nonetheless.

I won’t try to fool you into thinking Golden Door is action-packed. It moves with an almost hypnotic rhythm, its tone largely observational and unassuming, marked by occasional impressionistic spells characterized by the use of slow-motion and anachronistic but thematically appropriate music. (Curiously, it used for its finale Nina Simone’s driving rendition of ‘Sinnerman’ the same year that David Lynch used the song to back up the rousing closing credit sequence of Inland Empire.) There are also detours into complete fantasy, dreams where the Promised Land’s rivers of milk truly flow free and Salvatore must swim to reach some parcel of earth along with so man others. And it’s intriguing to me that Golden Door fuses planes of both grim realism and dreamy reverie. Perhaps Crialese really was channeling the same spirit as Malick when he came up with his own Nuovomondo –there’s a lot to be said for summoning up the past through such a rich lens of imagination.