AMOUR (Michael Haneke)

By Robert Koehler

Having just turned 70, Michael Haneke appears to be turning a new leaf in his abrasive view of humanity as being, for all its attempts at civilization, barely out of the jungle. This view might in the end be correct, but Haneke’s particularly insistence on it and his habit for mechanistic and even sadistic methods for dramatizing it can sometimes be the work of an artist who’s effectively pinning down his characters like a butterfly collector secures his possessions to a board. In his displays of complete technical and dramatic control of his materials, Haneke accentuates the impression of an uber controlling artist who allows no oxygen into the room.

The fascination of Amour is that the oxygen tank is turned on by Haneke this time, although this or any other medical device will be enough in the end to save the life of dying piano teacher Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), who’s patiently and meticulously cared for in her Paris flat by her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant). A film whose title permits no ironic reading, Amour is precisely what the title identifies: The response by one loved on toward another in dire conditions, in which precisely unconditional love is called for and acted upon.

At the same time, Amour is a bit too prim and proper, too buttoned-up, too designed to win end-of-the-year critics awards, too elegantly turned out to please. It’s a kind of art house movie parade, presenting all of the items that would directly please the Laemmle Theatre’s target audience (of a certain age, cultured, urban, old enough to recall Trintignant and Riva as A Man and a Woman). Haneke has made an honest film without sensationalism, but it’s also quite strategically programmed, down to the lust in its bones to win yet another Palme d’Or, which may very well happen.

The great, moving entity at the center of Amour is Trintingant, whose first perception that something is wrong with Anne—she simply shuts down for a minute or two over breakfast—produces not concern so much as peeved anger, as if she’s playing a game and he’s the butt of a joke. It’s a fascinating choice, and true to the emotional temperature that caregivers of ailing loved ones often feel. These are genuinely cultured people (like their audience), regularly attending concerts, conversing about the new biography on conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, whose last name is casually mentioned in the same way that NBA fans would mention Kobe. Their book shelves—always an important, revealing detail in Haneke’s dramas—are bulging with music and art books, literature, CDs, and the living room remains centered on the grand piano which is slightly out of tune. Yet this life of culture is about to retreat to the background as health matters become all-consuming.

Their only daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is genuinely concerned that her father is taking on too much; Eva may or may not know that caregivers who give their all often die before those they’re caring for, but she grows increasingly perplexed at Georges’ efforts to completely control the situation (sort of like the way Michael Haneke directs his movies), down to locking the bedroom door so nobody can see Anne in her decrepid state. “You can’t stop me from seeing her,” Eva correctly tells him, and the movie can’t stop the viewer from seeing Anne in her final phase, verging on death, and finally refusing even to take water.

Amour doesn’t so much end in murder, but relief (Rick Santorum’s response, if we care, would be outrage, confirming his worst fears about those suicidal Dutch), though Haneke makes too fine a point of it by having Georges handle an errant pigeon which has flown in the apartment window not by killing it as would have happened in an earlier movie by the maker of Funny Games but by gently capturing and freeing it. The symbolism is obvious, the gesture is telling, even close to a direct message: I, Michael Haneke, am no longer into torture. At least, not until the next movie.

THE HUNT (Thomas Vinterberg)

By Robert Koehler

The strange case of Thomas Vinterberg is a model of a director not to follow, lest you fall into the chasm known as Submarino (2010). The case, though, has made a new and unexpected turn. News flash (sort of): The Hunt is a solidly made, consistently coherent and steadily intensifying drama that extols the great Scandanavian theatrical tradition of the idea of a single conscience against the world. In one sense, The Hunt is Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, re-set for our era of fears (real and imagined) of pedophilia. But it’s also a case of a director who, since the vastly overrated The Celebration, has suggested the promise of making films generated by vital dramatic ideas, failed on that promise over the past decade, and yet now may have finally found his focus.

In this way, that clever promotional gimmick known as Dogme ’95, of which Vinterberg was a part, was the worst thing that could have happened to him. His best instincts are theatrical, not cinematic, and the trickery of Dogme with its pseudo-Calvinist self-abnegation and disposal of “production values,” proved a distraction. Re-positioned in the world of Ibsen, where he clearly belongs, Vinterberg finds a central idea and holds it close. Better, he plays it out to its logical conclusion.

The premise: What’s a lonely, divorced man to do when turned upon by a little girl who’s not his own but has great affection for him? Working as an assistant at a suburban Danish kindergarten, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is a favorite of the kids, even as he struggles with his ex-wife to get more visitation rights with his teen son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom). (This drama-within-the-drama echoes a similar charged dynamic at the center of Radu Jude’s superb Berlin festival film, Everyone in the Family.) Unexpectedly, after a pleasant stretch where Lucas gives a bit of extra attention to little, darling Klara (Annika Wedderkopp)—including walking her home—she imagines a sexual encounter with him.

People tend to believe children, as more than one character observes, and this universal tendency sets a trap for Lucas, who finds that not only the entire school staff, but much of the town suspects and turns against him. Vinterberg insists upon Lucas’ position, viewing the McMartinesque drift of the community as a pull toward collective madness that reaches a level of unhinged physical danger in a tense sequence in a supermarket. The movie increasingly becomes Mikkelsen’s: His hawk-like features soften under the continual blows to his sense of self and worth, his deflated body slowed by the weight of what’s falling down on him. Vinterberg, though, doesn’t exclusively privilege Lucas: When he’s finally arrested, The Hunt shifts for a time to Marcus as a way to illustrate the full human cost of what’s unfolding. Through this mechanism, it becomes clear that Vinterberg is fundamentally an actor’s director, and when he lands upon a naturally dramatic subject that can unlock buried emotions, the results leave a mark. Even what appears to be a facile finale (or as the supertitle on screen announces, “one year later”), the closing moments leave the viewer in a state of suspended uncertainty, once again disturbed and aware that what may have been resolved is only an illusion.

PARADISE: LOVE (Ulrich Seidl)

By Robert Koehler

As the first part of a trilogy with the umbrella title of Paradise about three middle-aged sisters on some kind of vacation, Paradise: Love is Ulrich Seidl at his most unexpectedly emotional. A study of one of the sisters, Anna Maria (Maria Hofstatter), being seduced by the idea and then the reality of sexual tourism while on holiday in Kenya, Seidl’s movie attacks less an enchanting paradise than a fascinating paradox: Feminist Colonialism, or, if you wish, Colonialist Feminism. Beginning her getaway as the innocent abroad soaking up the rays, sights and sounds of a resort catering to the tastes and sensibilities of the European tourist (a condition that ideally serves Seidl’s highly developed taste for cool satire), Anna Maria finds herself drawn to the possibilities of abandoning conventional sexual morés and following other women into the same kind of business that Laurent Cantet attempted and failed to dramatize in Heading South: the exchange of female cash for young, black male sex. The desire for The Other—a pal describes the taste of the young Kenyans’ skin as “like coconut”—is played in the early sections for comedy, and then finally, as absurdly impossible. In the course of things, Anna Maria finds herself able to puncture an unspoken barrier, between closely held notions of proper and improper sex, interracial relations, and the sense of what money can buy. In a superbly sustained and staged closing sequence when the corpulent gals try play a contest to see who can get one of the “Negroes” (as the subtitles, presumably written in the year 2012, astonishingly state) to get it up first. The sequence encapsulates Seidl’s challenge to his audience, which is to make sense of women turning men into their playthings and performing as the sexually dominant partner, yet at the same time acknowledging that these women are playing out the age-old roles of European occupier of African space, still colonizing (the tourism business, the sexual tourism business) and maintaining the master-servant relationship of the European colonial period, which Paradise: Love suggests, is not over. Yet the enigmatic, dancerly closing image suggests yet another reading: In a long shot—symmetrical, as always with Seidl—facing the resort’s beach and the ocean, a woman who may be Anna Maria walks in one direction while a group of Kenyan youth approach in the opposite direction, passing in the middle, and doing cartwheels in an act of complete freedom.

MEKONG HOTEL (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

By Robert Koehler

A sketch for the larger “Mekong Project,” which will include at least one other film, Apichatpong’s work dances between time zones, physical spaces, bodies and finally, the Mekong itself, a wide swathe of drifting water whose flow forms a steady, epochal background for several, lightly handled dialogues. Some of these involve chats between a woman named Phon and a guy named Tong, whose dog is eaten by a ghost called a “Pob ghost,” a unique Thai apparition that can infect its human hosts with the desire to gobble flesh. Ghosts are real in Apichatpong’s cinema, and they take on extremely carnal, almost Grand Guignol effect: At times, they munch on raw meat (it looks a bit like ground steak tartar), but the mood is never close to horror. Rather, Mekong Hotel is pitched more to the tone of a reverie, made even lilting by an element which Apichatpong has never deployed before: Constant music on the soundtrack, written and performed by classical guitarist Chai Bhatana, who describes on-screen to the director that it’s something like “Spanish blues.” It’s perhaps the right kind of music to listen to in order to salve the pain of the recent terrible floods in Thailand, which effectively shut down the country during the end of last year. The scars of the flood haunt the film—an exposed tree trunk at one point appears in the middle of the giant river, reminding one and all about the disaster. Many of the scenes offer glimpses of what could be a much larger film to come. But Mekong Hotel is more rounded than a mere sketch: The spectre of the flood gives way in the astonishing closing image to the river as a field of play and continuity. In a grand long shot from the hotel balcony, several people race around on SkiDoos, carving curves and circles and paisley patterns in the gray-blue current, and then a long boat emerges at the bottom of the frame, cutting a straight line against the current, an arrow of tradition intersecting with the whirls of modernity. It one-ups the magnificent river race sequence in Antonioni’s Il grido, where race boats are seen cutting lovely lines on the surface of another gray river, a set of images that draw great beauty from the interplay between the infinite flow of the river, the shift and shape of the water created by the playful boats. Apichatpong’s final image expands on this, with boats of the past and present brought together in an integrated pattern, history unfolding as the river flows past.

RUST & BONE (Jacques Audiard)

By Robert Koehler

A straight, flat and blunt object, Jacques Audiard’s new movie sits there, like a dumb thing. It is literally what it is, and no more; that is, everything Audiard presents on screen is the sum total, with no subtext, no metaphor, no underbelly. Here it is: Bullhead star Matthias Schoenaerts plays Ali, an occasional petty thief and former boxer and kickfighter, who takes his little boy to the Cote d’Azur to live with his sister Louise (Celine Sallette), a grocery store checkout clerk. Finally landing a job as a club bouncer, Ali encounters Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a trainer of orcas at the local Marineland, where she experiences a terrible accident that leaves her without her lower extremities. Lured into the world of street fighting by the suspicious Martial (the intensely bearded Boulli Lanners), Ali wins some and loses some (including his teeth) while maintaining a relationship with Stephanie that’s both erotic and de-personalized: Ali can’t connect with people, while Stephanie, finding a way to walk with artificial limbs, revives herself. She’s light on her feet, and he is all bulk and punch and growl, impervious, willing to allow himself to be a player in human cockfights. Why he does this is apparently of no interest to Audiard, whose reason for making the movie is, in the end, a mystery. Ali’s son finally redeems him, but it’s through yet another water-bound, near-death accident, and the whole project seems irrelevant in its gestures and effect, the kind of film that King Vidor made far better 70-plus years ago. Audiard utterly lacks poetry in his filmmaking and direction, relying entirely on his actors to provide grist and blood and a pulse. Schoenaerts and Cotillard do this, but is this any surprise? They’re arguably not good but great actors, and they’re here to deliver, which they do. But, like all of Rust & Bone, there’s no surprise or shock in the performances, except for possibly the (highly digitized) sight of legless Cotillard, her thighs tattoed “Gauche” and “Droite,” astride Schoenaerts for some lusty sex. The images don’t last in this instantly forgettable melodrama.

AFTER THE BATTLE (Yousry Nasrallah)

By Robert Koehler

It didn’t take long to find the first work in the competition that doesn’t belong there. Nasrallah is a veteran Egyptian director who makes socially minded films with blunt directness. Subtlety isn’t where he ventures, and After the Battle hammers its messages home. Since those messages are about Egypt’s semi-revolution after Tahrir Square, they could be welcome and interesting. But he chooses to couch them in a poorly conceived tale with flatly drawn characters meant to represent their classes. Reem (Mena Shalaby) is a middle-class activist and environmentalist—the closest thing in Egypt to a member of the Green Party—who becomes involved with the doings of the movie’s working class hero, Mahmoud (Bassem Samra), who was part of the group of horsemen who famously attacked Tahrir protestors as henchman for then-President Hosni Mubarek. Much of After the Battle plays like a Ken Loach movie—as if we need two Ken Loach movies in the competition—and which may partly explain why it’s here. Scenes of political debate alternate with scenes with personal interaction, but the agenda is always at play, which to have Reem understand what makes Mahmoud tick, and for Mahmoud to realize that there’s a bigger world beyond his small, rounded world of horse training and male values. Nasrallah’s camera is extraordinarily clunky, and the pacing and structure gives off the odor of commercial television. A dunderheaded finale of Mahmoud symbolically climbing one of the pyramids at Giza is, incredibly, handled with great, literal seriousness.

MOONRISE KINGDOM (Wes Anderson)

By Robert Koehler

“Why,” asked a skeptical-sounding Chinese TV journalist with an assertive microphone of those exiting the Wednesday afternoon press screening of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, “is Moonrise Kingdom the opening film of Cannes?” To which one could only respond, “Why not?” I thought back on my impassioned support for the decision to program Anderson’s previous and best film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, as opening night film of AFI Fest in 2009, and realized, as the microphone inched closer to my face, that Anderson’s cinema contains a peculiar mix that makes it an ideal opening night vehicle. There’s a kind of absolute auteurism, a hyper-aggressive formalism, an insistence on the camera’s view as a proscenium arch inside of which an entirely theatrical universe is created, alongside a lightness, a preference for melancholy swathed in the scent of vanilla, sadness as a weekend romp, the melodramas of parents and the children they don’t understand as storybook fantasies.

Unlike the wily, crafty Mr. Fox, Anderson’s heroes this time are children on the cusp of teenhood in 1965, an interesting time to become a teen and a time when color films had an odd sheen to them, with the color sometimes draining out of them on contact. That’s the look here—the film was shot on Super 16mm and then transferred to digital—and it oddly helps the film from feeling nostalgic. The opening minutes, for that matter, the opening 40 minutes, are fairly divine, as Anderson and Roman Coppola’s screenplay relates an escape into the wilderness by Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman), both deemed disturbed and unmanageable by those adults who supposedly care for them. In the movie’s most experimental and dangerous tack, Hayward and Gilman—who share a large amount of screen time together—are deliberately directed to perform awkwardly, verbally flat, their sheer botchedness designed to become an expression of pre-teen discomfort. The strategy works. Their flight is told both in straight chronology and in a few extremely clever flashbacks—one of several signs in Moonrise that Anderson’s work as a director has been fundamentally altered by making Mr. Fox—but above all, as a lunchbox/storybook/Capt. Kangaroo version of Tristan und Isolde without the liebestod. Most of the adults, as usual with Anderson (Mr. Fox being a striking and moving exception), are idiots: Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy’s parents pose as authority figures but they’re just sticks, Edward Norton as a Scoutmaster for the Khaki Scouts of America’s Camp Ivanhoe tries to be a general in charge but he’s worse than one of Lincoln’s commanders, and Tilda Swinton showing up as a child services official is nothing but hot air. Bruce Willis, as the top cop for the story’s New England island setting, at least is seriously trying to find the runaways, while carrying on an affair with McDormand. And Bob Balaban, in the movie’s best performance, delivers direct-address backgrounders on the nature and history of the island, and knows of the devastating storm about to hit the place.

Anderson doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, and piles it on in the second half, until Moonrise Kingdom loses much of its mirthful charm. Its storybook pages get gummed and marked with a pile-on of business, rivalries within rivalries within rivalries, Hurricane Harvey Keitel making an entrance (even Coppola’s relation Jason Schwartzman, in a fairly pointless turn), the flood stirred by the storm and, for good measure, Benjamin Britten’s own operatic version of Noah and the Great Flood. What was gliding along is now stomping along, and there’s the itch to want to make it all stop, or at least, calm back down to what it was. It’s one thing to have Britten, in his classic Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra (used as a leitmotif here), adding on an instrument at a time until you have the fully rounded orchestra; it’s another to add on to something that’s already complete, as the early phases of Moonrise Kingdom are.

By Robert Koehler

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life begins, all too appropriately, with a yolk-colored blob. Like a scientist’s experiment which has been fussed over until it’s lost its original hypothesis (let alone any proof), Malick’s new film is the work of a man who has so overthought his material that it has flipped, and become underthought, a welter of contradictory ideas, a toxic brew of literalism and spiritualism, an acid trip without the necessary acid. He has turned a chamber piece about a Texas family in the post-war era into a bloated behemoth. He has fatally forgotten the wisdom that in the specific lies the universal, and instead imposes an entirely unearned universal construct on top of a small story that should have a running time of no more than 80 minutes, rather than its entirely unjustifiable 137-minute length–a marker of uncontrolled hubris.

I noted in my review in Cinema Scope of Malick’s previous film, The New World, that the key to understanding his cinema is that he’s a birder. This does not apply to The Tree of Life, although there may be more actual birds on screen in the new work. It would be good to report that the key lies in Malick’s previous life (before he became a film director with Badlands in 1973) as a lecturer in philosophy at MIT, where he specialized in Heidegger. The Tree of Life is replete with philosophy, to be sure; oh, my, is it ever, all of it stated, as with every verbal utterance on the soundtrack (most of which are delivered in a nearly inaudible whispered voiceover by the various characters), absolutely and firmly on the nose. But the philosophy is now confused, amorphous, cosmic, furry-headed variations on the now-old New Age movement. Indeed, that would be a better title for the opus: The New Age.

He has made one film, interrupted by another; or, seen from another angle, two films, each refusing to meld with the other. The first is a memory narrative about middle-aged Houston architect Jack (Sean Penn), prompted out of nothing in particular–perhaps, as far can be vaguely perceived from Malick’s fractured depiction of activity, a bad day at the office–to recall his painful childhood growing up in Waco, Tx. with father Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), mom Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) and brothers R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan). As Jack grows up, he develops an antipathy toward his father, whom we are told quite bluntly early on represents ”the way of nature,” while mother represents “the way of grace.” (In Malick’s philosophical construct, “nature” is bad, imposing, arrogant; ”grace” is “never having to justify one’s self.” More on this slice of intellectual nonsense later.) Raised in a “good” home but with a strict, disciplinarian father, Jack begins to rebel as he moves toward his teen years, and flirts with bad deeds. Father, who falls on rough times with his failed attempts to cash in on his various patents, seems to try to re-bond with Jack, even as he moves the family to a much nicer neighborhood. (Even though he’s fallen on bad times, a nifty detail Malick never explains.) Later, one of Jack’s brothers dies at age 19 for no known reason (perhaps in Vietnam, or Korea, or somewhere else, who knows? Does Malick?)–a deliberate though unrealized tragedy depicted, in a true storytelling perversity, not near the end of Tree of Life, but at its beginning.

The other film? This would be Malick’s depiction of the beginning of the local solar system, the forming of Earth and the origins of life, from the microbial stage to the dinosaurs. Again, this is not where The Tree of Life begins proper, but some twenty minutes in, after Penn’s voice whispers things like “Brother?” and “Mother?”, some blobs appear and disappear, Jack’s family is introduced, Jack’s mother receives a telegram announcing the son’s death, and Penn’s adult Jack is seen rummaging around his gorgeous architect’s desk and walking amidst a forest of glassy skyscrapers (presumably The Trees of Corporate Life, given the way they are filmed at extreme low angles with ultra-wide focal lenses in identical fashion to the film’s many actual trees). For no particular reason or catalyst, Malick chooses to jump literally into the cosmos, assembling a gorgeous string of images. Derived from pictures by the Hubble deep space telescope, and processed by the Palomar Observatory and the Digitized Sky Survey at Caltech, the images show the births of stars, galaxies and then our planet, followed by a montage of subatomic particles, cellular organisms, ancient fish and then, finally, two CGI created dinosaurs.

From some closely similar music cues and planetary and prehistoric images to its leaps in time and space, this other film simply and openly begs comparison with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, let’s compare. The narrative leap out of the family film into the dinosaur film is not the kind of leap made by 2001‘s Moon Watcher ape tossing his bone weapon into the air and transforming in cinema’s greatest edit to a spaceship; there’s no expressive or meaningful transition, but rather, a seemingly arbitrary cut that may have just as well happened sooner or later. The montage of astronomical, geologic, geographic and underwater images that follow in some ways closely parallel the opening montage of primordial landscapes in “The Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001, but they soon have the feeling of a montage in an IMAX film presented in a science park, missing only Morgan Freeman’s narration explaining the development of life on earth. (Perhaps the only spot in The Tree of Life in which voice-over does not occur.) They also indicate a critical problem with the visual nature of Malick’s film, which is that the images are discrete unto themselves, picturesque rather than cinematic, producing the sensation of flipping through pages in a coffee-table photography book (or, in the case of Jack’s family, pictures in the album of a family we don’t know).

Most critical in a 2001 comparison is how this “Dawn of Life” film-within-a-film climaxes, and how it points to the film’s central philosophical defects. A long-necked dinosaur, first observed at its beach hangout, lopes into a forest where it encounters a smaller, wounded dino prey, looking for all intents and purposes like dinner as it presses a claw like a death-grip on the little guy’s head. But, in a truly Spielbergian moment (and even Spielberg couldn’t conceive of such dino-to-dino kindness in Jurassic Park), big dino takes apparent compassion upon little dino, releasing its grip and consoling it with a gentle stroke. This, we can only conclude, is the birth of love, or, at least, pity. (Compare, if you will, this image of big dino’s gentle claw with Monica Vitti’s white hand on the forehead of Gabriele Ferzetti at the end of L’Avventura for a useful contrasting expression of genuine pity.) This is pure anthropomorphism, and precisely the opposite of Kubrick’s apes-into-men. Such a depiction of dinosaur love is little more than human wish fulfillment, a fantasy–even a romance–of altruism amongst animals, and this after having just been told in blunt terms on the film’s whispered soundtrack that “nature” is bad. Kubrick’s apes, having accidentally stumbled upon the usefulness of bones as weapons, deploy their invention to kill members of a competing band of apes, confirming that man’s innately violent nature is certain to make tools into implements of violence. These, not love, are some of the elements of evolution.

A clearer difference in philosophies, between Malick’s essentially naive romanticism–which proves to gird much of what follows in The Tree of Life–and Kubrick’s Darwinian view of natural selection, is hard to imagine. Yet this probably wont stop the upcoming flow of commentary likening The Tree of Life to 2001, encouraged by the participation of Kubrick’s important special effects collaborator, Douglas Trumbull, with Malick, as well as a spate of classical music selections (John Tavener, Holst) which directly acknowledge the influence of 2001. While Malick’s early films, including Badlands and Days of Heaven, combined an awareness of class conflict and the inevitable clashes of human desire with a fascination with nature that bordered on Pantheism, The Tree of Life dives headlong into a world view that can be summed up in the Beatles lyric, “All you need is love.” Mrs. O’Brien, in one of her few whispered voice-overs as the family moves out of their old Waco house, states that without love, life goes by in a flash. Love is seen to finally bridge the growing barrier between Jack and his father. An increasing lack of love between Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien can be seen to fuel his angry outbursts when he’s confronted with his boys’ disobedience.

At the same time, Malick is either uninterested, unwilling or unable to convey emotions on screen, except through the crutch of all those whispered voiceovers allowing us to eavesdrop on characters’ inner thoughts. The annoying mannerism of the whispering aside (and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the spectacular misjudgment of the flagrant overuse of this device, to say nothing of its pseudo-poetic language, the on-the-nose obviousness and the particularly vexing issue that about 75% of what’s whispered is inaudible, even when seen in the Directors Guild’s superb big cinema), the emotional undercurrents are crowded off screen for the picturesque. The actual human dimension is replaced by bits of bullet-point dialogue; when Jack faces his father and says, “You’d like to kill me,” it doesn’t shock or resound, because there’s nothing backing it up, since there’s nothing in the father’s behavior that’s remotely homicidal, only aggressive. Malick wants to convey love’s force, and, as he deems it, “grace,” but he can’t find cinematic correlatives for it. His narrative contains all the aspects of a primal father-son conflict, but he drains it away and replaces it with New Age quotations. “The glory” is a term heard often, in a throwback to its use in The Thin Red Line to far more powerful effect, since it was tied to actual human endeavors and historical events. (The New Age effect also flows to the soundtrack: Tavener is a favorite composer with the New Age crowd, as well as the progressive Anglo-Saxon Christian crowd, with whom New Agers have much in common. This is also true of Henryk Gorecki, whose music is also periodically cued.) Even Mr. O’Brien’s real-world work at a giant oil refinery and his efforts to cash in on his various patents comes across as abstract and vacuous, materialist engagements framed in purely spiritualist terms; the refinery resembles nothing so much as a cathedral of industrial pipes, while the Texas state capitol building where O’Brien tramps around aimlessly and to no real purpose is filmed as if it were St. Peter’s in Rome.

The Tree of Life begins with a quotation from the Book of Job (Chapter 38, verses 4 and 7, in which God puts Job in his place), and references Job’s trials with God later during a pastor’s sermon. Nods to God and Job and references and quotations do not, however, by themselves earn meaning. Nor does a train of images early on of the family grieving over news of the son’s death conjure up a Job-like struggle. A detectable pattern emerges: Ideas are stated, and then not explored in cinematic terms. Worse: the ideas contradict one another. Take the matter of grace vs. nature, which Malick clearly intends as his central dialectic. The ways in which these two states of mind/existence are defined by Malick has little to do with any recognizable view of either. Grace is typically associated with either the comforting power of a supreme being, or in Malick’s Pantheistic view, an equilibrium between humans and nature. As for Nature, philosophers have clashed for centuries over it’s essential meaning, ranging from the kind of anthropomorphism dramatized by Malick with his dinos or poets’ use of “the pathetic fallacy” to a more scientific view that sees Nature as an amoral process of birth, life, death, decay and regeneration–the view, if you will, of “2001.” But Malick has wholly confused his terms. Two direct literary influences on The Tree of Life are William Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence; Faulkner for his fracturing of narrative into a stream-of-consciousness, better to convey the unstructured momentum of inner thought and emotions, and for his fascination with the eternal battle between fathers and sons; Lawrence for his concern with the conflict between what he viewed as ”nature” and “will.” Mr. O’Brien is a purely Lawrencian character, which Malick proceeds to utterly misread. Rather than representing nature (that would actually be Mrs. O’Brien, who’s constantly depicted outdoors, under the trees, walking barefoot in the grass, dipping her toes in water), Mr. O’Brien is pure will, and he states it as such in a few lines of dialogue while advising his sons on the cruel ways of the world. His entire character can be viewed as a man trying to exert his will on his sons to follow in his path; the middle son’s interest in music draws him closer to the father, who regrets aborting his own music studies (now channeled into some organ playing of Bach and record-spinning of Brahms and other composers at home), and which seems to spur Jack’s jealousy. This is not nature, but it’s opposite, the human forces impinging themselves upon nature, exactly as Lawrence viewed it.

Ultimately, Malick discards these matters for something far more amorphous: Adult Jack’s quest for meaning, conveyed in a manner that can only be described as graduate film school surrealism. In the early reels, Malick inserts strange footage of Sean Penn in his business suit traipsing through what may be a desert in California or Utah; trippy and maybe a bit silly, but quickly forgotten what with the dinosaurs and Jack v. dad tale that consumes much of the film. But then, in the final reel, it all comes back, with Penn’s Jack still traipsing, climbing over rocks, walking through a door standing alone in the wilderness (I’m not kidding), then the roofless family house (or a small section of it replicated by Malick’s longtime production designer Jack Fisk in the desert) and finally reaching a long, flat beach with lots of folks blankly wandering around. They include, in a true stroke of Kitsch, Jack’s family as they were when he was a kid; these are, it seems, the living dead, or ghosts of Jack’s past, or perhaps something else, since almost nobody in this gaggle of beachside wanderers outside of the family is recognizable from the rest of the film. Nothing much happens; Penn and Pitt walk silently together in the film’s only superstar moment, the kids receive a few hugs, the water laps ashore, and then it’s over.

And to what end? It might reasonably be expected that this sequence should be adult Jack’s final cathartic release of emotional memory, an expunging of familial toxins, a recognition of impending mortality as well as a reconciliation with the past. Whether this was Malick’s intention can only be guessed at, since none of this happens, and nothing else either, expect a bunch of images of various people walking on the beach. Literally, and nothing more, pictures. This is important, since endings are important, this is where he ends the film, accented by such postcard Kitsch as a shot of a field of sunflowers. Nothing more clearly points to a film run aground by undeveloped ideas in contradiction than this.

The tragedy of The Tree of Life is the film itself, a project of such profound importance to the filmmaker that he worked on concepts and images for it ever since he’s been a filmmaker–nearly 38 years. He clearly based the family story on his own memories growing up in Texas as a boy in the late 1940s and 1950s, and this is best preserved on film in the many wonderful, Wyeth-like moments of rambunctious boys playing indoors and out, having fun for the sake of it. (The sole moments of anything like lightness in a film utterly devoid of humor, irony or inference.) He sweated out several 200-page drafts, and when producer Bill Pohlad told him a decade ago that his script contained two films that weren’t joined into one, he worked on it some more, making The New World in the interim. It’s now clear that Pohlad’s criticism was precisely on point; what hardly makes any sense is why the film was subsequently funded and produced when the very problem Pohlad defined was never resolved. Like the New Age itself, The Tree of Life is an aspirational quest that can’t come full circle, since it never determines what it is in the first place, and concludes as a cinema con.