By Kevin Lally
FJI correspondent Daniel Steinhart reports from Cannes on the premiere showing of the mystery-shrouded new film from Terrence Malick.
On Monday at 8:30 a.m., Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, for many the most anticipated film of the festival, had its very first screening. Walking past more than the usual number of hopefuls holding up signs reading "Une invitation SVP" and through lines of a pushy press corps on edge to get a good seat in the arena-sized Grand Thtre Lumire, it felt a little like heading into a rock concert. Such is the atmosphere at Cannes, where the auteur can produce rock star-like devotion amongst film followers.
Since his second feature Days of Heaven (winner of the Best Director prize at the 1979 Cannes Festival), Malick has primarily built his films not around the cohesive scene, but around the fragmented sequence, often held together by voiceover narration or the musical score. The developed scene in a Malick film comes sporadically, often to deliver a bit of exposition or advance a piece of action. In The Tree of Life, Malick virtually dispenses with scenes and constructs a two-hour and 18-minute film around fractured sequences. The effect is a little like watching a big-budget, feature-length experimental film, full of trippy planetarium-style cosmology, the play of light and nature, and balletic camera movements (DP Emmanuel Lubezki's work here is superb). I like to imagine that this is what the late Stan Brakhage might have come up with as a director-for-hire had he been given a multi-million-dollar budget, some Hollywood stars, and a crack special-effects team.
The film's story is rather schematic: A boy named Jack lives with his two younger brothers, a doting mother, and a tough, overbearing father (Brad Pitt in a nice, lived-in performance) in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Unfolding across roughly four parts�or maybe movements is a better way to conceive the structure�the film opens with glimpses of both Jack's infancy and modern-day adulthood (here played out by an all-too-fleeting Sean Penn) before taking us into the most audacious segment of the film: a brief history of the cosmos. Then we settle into a kind of memory piece of Jack's childhood, captured in evocative impressions: snippets of small-town life, the play of brothers, the gentleness of a mother, and the tirades of a father who expects nothing but respect and discipline. Finally, we return back to the present only to be transported to what might be taken as an afterlife vision, played out on beach shores and salt flats.
Along the way, we are given few guideposts for meaning and connections amongst the different parts. (As expected, the ever-elusive director was absent from the post-screening press conference, probably in part to avoid addressing these issues). But early on via the movie's voiceover, we are offered two opposing forces�the way of grace and the way of nature�which seem to work their way through the contours of the film and the character of Jack. Perhaps it would be easy to equate the mother with grace and the father with nature, but the film seems too slippery to get very far with this sort of binary thinking. Certainly, the film demands audiences to work hard to connect the pieces while also succumbing to its fugue state.
The press screening was met with a fair amount of catcalls, an early sign that this is a divisive work. At Cannes, however, the detractors always seem to be the ones that need to be heard the most. While there's plenty of material on the screen to arm the non-believers that this is a pretentious and preposterous work, this same material could arm the faithful that this is a masterwork. But the film is too ambitious in scope and Malick is too important a filmmaker to merit quick, hyperbolic reactions. Although this may not be the best film of the festival, it is one of the few that truly aims to play with cinema's paint box. For that, it commands both attention and respect. And to help settle all the Internet speculation, yes, there are dinosaurs.
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