God, nature and nonsense

Before I try to convince you why Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is the worst thing to happen to film since James Cameron discovered motion capture, I beg you to look up Christopher Plummer’s comments from the 2012 Newsweek Oscar Roundtable on YouTube.

We can all trust Captain Von Trapp to deliver some honesty, right?

Plummer recounts his experience working on Malick’s The New World and very eloquently sums up why he’ll never work with the director again. Malick, he says, desperately needs a writer.

According to Plummer, Malick’s scripts are “terribly pretentious,” and he cuts everyone out of his movies, neglects or even eliminates the storyline and characters in favor of poetic visuals and turns emotional scenes into “background noise.”

The clip is worth watching, especially to see the clear amusement on George Clooney’s face, another roundtable member and Malick veteran.

It’s really too bad that Malick shows such blatant disrespect for actors and what they do, because the actors are the best part of 2011’s The Tree of Life. Jessica Chastain is a radiant and wonderful actress, deserving of all her hype.

As saintly 1950s housewife Mrs. O’Brien, she weeps elegantly over one of her sons dying in Vietnam. Then, in a flashback, she gets to smile beatifically at the sky, run her hands through grass and beckon her three boys in slow motion.

(If you ever want to die of alcohol poisoning, play a drinking game involving artistic shots of hands in a Terence Malick movie.)

Chastain also gets to whisper in voiceover, mostly nonsensical snippets about God and the underlying theme of nature versus divinity, which is the only real point to the movie.

A lengthy, dialogue-free series of visuals about the creation of life and the universe, including some pretty cool dinosaurs, comes about a half-hour into the film and ends with more of Mrs. O’Brien whispering about searching for her dead child. Blaring, pompous opera music plays the whole time. What more do I have to say?

Brad Pitt, as Mr. O’Brien, also has a couple whispered voiceovers, but he gets the most actual dialogue and the most room to give an actual performance of any actor in the film.

Pitt is a talented guy, and he does wonders with the tired cliche of the 1950s husband who is tough-bordering-on-abusive to his family.

Of course, he secretly wanted to be a musician. Of course, he teaches his young sons to box.

It’s a testament to Pitt that he makes Mr. O’Brien both heartfelt and disturbing, but the problem is that when he says things like, “You make yourself who you are. You are in control of your own destiny,” it’s hard to remember that Malick wants you to disagree and be on the side of Mrs. O’Brien, where God is in control of everything and we should all be meek and bond with lambs and butterflies.

Yes, The Tree of Life is undeniably a religious movie. Defenders of the film say it poses a series of questions, and the most prominent seems to be: Why does God let bad things happen to good people?

Didn’t we stop asking that question decades ago? Didn’t C.S. Lewis write something that summed it up? The Christian overtones are hard to take seriously, but it would be cheapening the argument to dislike The Tree of Life solely because I’m an agnostic.

Malick’s filmmaking is about a thousand times more offensive than his religion.

In all fairness, I know people who will say without irony that this film changed their life. To them, the grandeur is justified and powerful. I also know plenty of people who irrationally loathe it like I do. All of them have fairly decent taste.

And on some level, love-it-or-hate-it movies are always fascinating. How can people, many of whom often agree on things, look at a piece of filmmaking and have such diametrically opposed reactions? When The Tree of Life screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, it was booed by critics. Then it went on to win the Palme D’Or best directing prize. The conflict seems to extend across the board.

I don’t think of myself as particularly cynical or detached about films—in fact, quite the opposite. I’m a big fan of musicals and any form of unabashed, cathartic emotion in movies. I support earnestness.

But, to me, Terrence Malick isn’t earnest, or even emotional. The endless whispering, opera music and slow-motion shots of hands just add up to incredibly pointless pretension.

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, and my main entry into films is always through the writing. Maybe it’s because I’m a big fan of actors. How conventional of me to expect scripts and acting. I obviously don’t understand avant-garde moviemaking.

The Tree of Life comes close to achieving some depth, especially with Hunter McCracken as the younger version of the O’Briens’ oldest son. But every time there’s a piece of dialogue or a scene that might mean something, the camera cuts away and the actors are once again stock photography models.

Sean Penn is the older version of McCracken’s character, and he’s barely in the film—he just wanders around and looks sad. He has two Best Actor Oscars. Pitt is one of the biggest stars in the world. Chastain went to Juilliard. Yet they’re all merely Malick’s props.

I take issue with calling this film experimental. Replacing storytelling with pretty shots of cows and planets is not experimental filmmaking. It’s just ridiculous. The emperor has no clothes.

But I could be wrong. Maybe we should all listen to Mrs. O’Brien: “Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.”

If you’re on board with that, good for you. Just please stop whispering about it.