All the waiting is over. Cannes’ big coup, The Tree of Life, the long awaited fifth film from Terence Malick finally landed on planet Earth—and divided the strange life form known as the press into three parts: the pretty, the profound and the spiritual claptrap camps.
No one outside the New Age wavy gravy class of directors like Godfrey Reggio of Koyanisqaatsi fame back in the 80s, or the commercial, fantasy elite of George Lucas and James Cameron, has tried anything as philosophically planetary since Stanley Kubrick back in 1969 threw a bone in the air in 2001 and turned it into a space station run by a computer aboard with sympathy for the devil.
As the press screening ended Monday at the Grand Theatre Lumiere, Cannes’ spaceship sized cinema auditorium, and the credits started to roll, there was applause—not joyous as the day before for The Artist, a wry black and white homage to the days of silent film, but brief, respectful, and lusterless.
And there were some boos—one or two of them really loud, long insistent “BoooOOOOooooos,” ricocheting around the auditorium walls.
This is Europe, after all, and a film that looks for God--even if the story of Job is its starting point--and finds something like God in remembering to love one’s children everyday, a film can get booed for that. And did. “BooooooooOOOOooooo.”
The Tree of Life is in competition, and the producers, a fusion of early backers and Fox Searchlight Pictures, seem to have calculated that winning the Palme d’Or has helped American films like Pulp Fiction (1994) in the past, losing it won’t hurt, and any publicity north of a wipeout in Cannes, where art is still king, could only help the rollout of the film (May 27 in the US) across the planet it ponders for 138 minutes.
When it finally gets around to its non-narrative, the film concerns a typical 1950’s American family in a small Texas town, with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain embodying the post-war O’Briens presiding over the American century. There are tons of details from Mercurochrome on kids’ cuts, to gray Studebakers parked out front, to BB guns being a rite of 10 year-old passage.
But then comes a bad telegram about the oldest son, plunging the family into the doubts of Job, and Malick pulls back the skin to lay bare the fault in the American character: misplaced male authority grounded in misused Christian theology. The American male—you can almost hear the Bush family of Midland in the O’Briens--brought the same skills that won the great war to parenting in Texas and better suburbs everywhere. And the two don’t mix, it turns out in The Tree of Life.
“I beat my kids regularly,” Pitt deadpanned in response to a question about his own parenting style at the press conference here. “And deprive them of meals. Seems to do the trick.” Pitt added that Malick and the cast talked a lot about theology, and described Malick as “more of a spiritualist with a universalist viewpoint than a compartmentalized version of a Christian.”
The film also flashes forward to the way we live now, as Sean Penn essays one of the surviving children, a weary architect in the sleek 21st century, a place that is all glass, greed and no heart, mulling over what happened back in Texas in the 50s, not just to his family, but by implication to the nation.
To get there and then transcend it all, however, Malick reels his story all the way back to the creation of the universe, and runs through fire, water, sand, rock, moss and a lone tree, dinosaurs, gestation and rain forests. So much of The Tree of life is cinematographic Darwin, Audubon, NASA’s Saturn mission, and a digital FX army summoning up elements, cell life, smoke, steam, the contour of planets, and the curve of space, time and the Milky Way. It’s all part of Malick ratcheting down the hubris in favor of embracing speck of dust humility.
Things seemed so good in the American mid-century, that the doe-eyed Chastain can point to the sky and say to her children, “That’s where God lives.” And the assumption is that America has beaten the odds. God has chosen the American male to be God’s right hand man in eliminating risk, change and damage.
Speaking of which, Malick is perhaps the one American director who’s been as protected as Woody Allen from the beady-eyed accountancy of the business class. Even Allen has had to go abroad over the last decade looking for finance guys impressed with the idea of bankrolling a real American auteur. Along the way, Allen has burned his way through London and Paris with a decade of mixed results, and now he’s headed to Rome. Then again when you make five films in 33 years, as has Malick, it might take a decade for the bean-counting guys to catch up with you.
Maybe it’s no accident that films by both Malick and Allen are here in Cannes, where the filmmaker is still roi. Allen showed up last week to make the case for his film, Midnight in Paris. But the reclusive Malick is MIA in Cannes, sending Brad Pitt, Chastain and a line of producers to speak for the film in his place.
“He is very shy,” explained Sarah Green, one of the producers. Said another, “He puts the film out there and lets people make of it what they will.”
