Sven

mykicks asked: It's really not different because the only problem with The Tree of Life you laid out in your post was that it was "white people problems," which is a really shallow criticism, and one that you can use against most movies when you dumb them down enough. With the exception of Sean Penn's character as an adult, the characters in the movie aren't even wealthy - Brad Pitt spends most of the movie yearning to be wealthy, and then loses his job.

I hoped you would have understood that my post was not a full movie review.

If it doesn’t win cinematography I’m going to be pissed.

But this movie is seriously just. Blech. It’s so heavy-handed in its ambiguity, except for when it starts feeling dogmatic (not in its religious aspect, but in Malick’s temptation to shove his discontent and/or world view without ceasing).

Thin Red Line is a really good example of Malick at his top form because it’s still got a story even though it gets a bit abstract in its philosophy.

But the nature v. grace battle is too obvious (ambition v. faith in There Will Be Blood is one of the only _____ v ______ movies that I think has been successful [at least recently]). He makes a good case for it, and again, it’s an absolutely beautiful film, but fucking please with Jessica Chastain moaning over 20 minutes of the universe being created. I feel like that section of the film would have been so much better without her moaning. And I totally don’t like its placement in the film, but that’s just because I personally think it would have felt more natural after a little more context (instead of “here’s some vague exposition and then here, look at these pretty pictures, I promise we’ll get back to the story I got you interested in”).

Anyway. Malick is really hit or miss for me, so I knew there was no middle ground coming into this movie. He frames it as a movie with such intense feeling but then makes it incredibly difficult to actually feel anything, because the story goes huge time spans without advancing at all. Not to mention the fact that I really would care about these characters except for the context in which it displays them. It’s almost like the film is reminding us constantly how big the universe is, and how little the story matters. The performances are so good, and the characters so deliciously unrelatable, that the framing of the movie ends up undermining a lot of that, in my opinion.

But god damn is it pretty.

EDIT: This being said, it’s not the type of movie I think I’ll watch just once, so I might yet change my mind.

1. safyhallanfarah liked this
2. mykicks said: I will say that I didn’t really like it the first time I saw it. Now I’ve seen it three times and it’s my favorite film of last year, and I could probably watch it once a week.
3. svennysvensven posted this