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Movie of the Week #31 - The Tree of Life
So last of the Cannes films this month with The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick from 2011. It won the highest price, Palme d'Or, at the Cannes Festival.
Besides any thoughts on this movie, are you familiar with other Terrence Malick movies? Any comments on Cannes films in general?
The schedule for June is:
- 3rd: The Wicker Man (1973)
- 10th: Ravenous (1999)
- 17th: X (2022)
- 24th: The Exorcist (1973)
This seems like a type of film people either deeply connect with or completely drop out off. I was in the later group. I mostly liked Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, whereas this was completely dead to me. Terrence Malick has a flair for beautiful visuals, which is also present here, but better applied in the other two.
Ambitions sure are high here with philosophical musings about the meaning of life and the cosmos, but this is no 2001 or Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I respond better to character driven films and here the actors feel very distant and impersonal. There are just there and not very engaging to follow. It is set up as a mans loose memories and musings of his childhood, which makes for an unstructured narrative - which could be fine, but the potential for a personal story gets lost in the self-absorbing whispered musings of nothing and everything.
As for Cannes films in general, where I have now been through a decent bunch of various winners, I would say it is almost worth watching. For movies that really want to try something different, Cannes winners are a pretty good source. But it also clear that they like a certain type of film. They sure like their misery with bad things happening to good people.
I thought you would enjoy this more, winther, because you previously had stated you prefer when a movie has a slower pace with quieter editing when discussing movies like Oppenheimer.
I like this movie a lot. But I realize that it’s somewhat polarizing as the film got both Booed and cheered at its Cannes premiere. I think it’s like Mirror, vignettes of the Director’s life, captured beautifully by its Cinematography as we hear pontificating nothings in voice over. I think maybe why I liked it more is because the Brad Pitt character reminds me of my own father. And Pitt and Chastain’s dynamic mirrors my own parents.
I first watched this in early 2020, when I was doing a catch-up with Best Picture nominees. I went backwards watching nominees I had missed throughout the years, 2011 was actually one of the years I had to watch the most because I wasn’t into movies when I was 11. That was kind of a fun experience.
This was the beginning of Malick using this style for a spiritual trilogy that consisted of To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song. Similar set up: beautiful shots and voice overs, but they were about young-ish people. I’ve only ever seen To The Wonder but I’ve been meaning to watch the other two for a while now. If you didn’t like Tree of Life you won’t like those though.
Tree of Life winning the Palme is also a somewhat interesting story. As Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia was actually set to win before Trier’s infamous press conference where he said he understood Hitler. This also killed any chances of Dunst getting Lead Actress awards.
No worries, unlike Melancholia I actually finished this. Always appreciate taking a risk and it is clearly widely acclaimed and praised, so it just one of those things where it is hard to get into the movie, if you don't relate to anything. The Texas suburb upbringing we see here is too far removed from what I know and then it is difficult to engage with the rather distant style of acting used here.