“GRACE VS. NATURE”

By Raymond Benson

Not many filmmakers since the great Stanley Kubrick have had the same kind of mystique, but one who easily fits that bill is Terrence Malick, a writer/director who has endeavored to redefine the narrative form of cinema in visually poetic terms.

Malick doesn’t create movies, he makes cinema in verse. The story in a Malick film is not a priority, although there is often a profound tale at work. A Malick picture is all about the emotions, the visual beauty, the aural splendidness, and taking part in a cerebral, yet primally impressionistic experience.

The reclusive filmmaker disappeared from the public eye after his two acclaimed, more “accessible” works (Badlands, 1973, and Days of Heaven, 1978). He returned twenty years later and made The Thin Red Line (1998). Something was immediately different about his art. Malick’s storytelling was more oblique, nonlinear, and lyrical. This trend continued more intensely in The New World (2005). Never one to be labeled “prolific,” Malick brought out his fifth feature, The Tree of Life, in 2011, and it featured a radical progression in this elegiac, non-traditional way of spinning a yarn.

The Tree of Life received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography (by Emmanuel Lubezki), but there were many audience members who just didn’t get it or refused to meet the film halfway. I remember counting many walkouts from the theater in which I first saw it. Its comparison to the initial reaction to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is apt. This was a new kind of film, something that challenged the viewer into sitting back, opening the mind and the heart, and going with the flow.

And flow it does… the picture is much like a symphony of sight and sound. The imagery of the world in all its glory from the ground, sky, and sea to the plants, animals, and people is breathtakingly sensual. The music—mostly classical pieces and some original scoring by Alexandre Desplat—is practically continuous as the pace of the editing moves frenetically. How anyone could call this a boring movie is mind-boggling.

There is a story. The focus is on the O’Briens, a family in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, particularly utilizing the point of view of the oldest boy, Jack (played by newcomer Hunter McCracken). Brad Pitt is the stern, sometimes over-the-top disciplinarian father, and angelic Jessica Chastain is the loving mother. Jack’s two siblings are played by Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan. The entire family’s performances are superb. Scenes in the present day feature an adult Jack (Sean Penn), who is somberly “remembering” the events of the film. Something has triggered old Jack’s memory of when the middle brother died at the age of nineteen (we don’t know how… possibly Vietnam?).

And then there’s the creation sequence, something else that is comparable to the Star Gate section of 2001 (and that film’s co-visual effects supervisor, Douglas Trumbull, is a consultant on Tree). We see in a nearly twenty-minute segment how the earth was formed in the heavens, how life began in the waters, the rise of dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs!), the predatory disposition of certain species, and their eventual destruction to make way for man.