Is Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life a great movie? David Denby thinks so. In his
“Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece” (included in his 2012 collection Do
the Movies Have a Future?), he says,
Interminable, madly repetitive, vague, grandiose; an
art-history Summa Theologica crossed
with a summer camp documentary on the wonders of the universe; sexless yet
sexist, embracing of everything in the world but humour (and is wit not as
essential to our existence as air?) – Terrance Malick’s The Tree of
Life is insufferable. It is also,
astoundingly, one of the great lyric achievements of the screen in recent years
and a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema – a change in
technique which is also a change in consciousness. An insufferable masterpiece,
then; a film to be endured in a state of enraged awe.
“Great”
and “insufferable” strike me as contradictory. I agree with the “insufferable”
part. This week, in the magazine, in a review of Malick’s latest vacuity, To
the Wonder, Denby repeats his ambivalent verdict regarding The
Tree of Life. He says, “The movie could be unbearable at times,
but the center held. It’s a great film.” But he goes on to pan To the Wonder in terms that are, it seems to me, applicable to The Tree of Life. For example, he says, “A Malick
sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually
ravishing but bound together by what feels like the trivial narcissism of
Carribbean-travel ads on TV.” This perfectly expresses my opinion of The Tree
of Life, except I would change “has now become” to “is.” Similarly, Denby’s
“And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough” gets at the
core of what is “insufferable” about Malick’s movies: their unrelenting,
dreamy-soft pictorialism. In “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece,”
Denby touches on this point when he asks, “Hasn’t he [Malick] narrowed life
down only to those elements that can be etherealized?” More than the lack of
dialogue, more even than the absence of humour, it’s this ethereal quality that
saps Malick’s films of life’s juice and constitutes their most serious flaw.
Pauline Kael was onto this thirty-nine years ago when she said of the
protagonists of Malick’s first film, Badlands, “Kit and
Holly are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose; it’s as if
the director had taped gauze over their characters, so that we wouldn’t be able
to take a reading on them” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March
18, 1974; included in Kael’s brilliant 1976 collection Reeling).
No comments:
Post a Comment