The Tree of Life - goofy or insulting?

Saving some posts from another board.

1-20-12



Malick's overall strength was he is so good at showing humans as parts of an environment. Since Badlands, humans haven't been creators of their worlds, only creatures among creatures hewed by the forces of chemistry and physics. No other director has so successfully told a story while projecting an all inclusive cosmology of all life forms. Humans attempts to lock out nature, in the form of houses or guns, look so silly compared to the presence of our natural home.

What makes Tree of Life rather silly is that Malick has said all this before without the heavy-handed sentimentality. An old philosopher is obviously giving us his last pitch, his last lesson, which comes across as dogma this time, rather than finely crafted visual exploration.

It doesn't help that the only female in the movie made me cringe. Was the mother supposed to be brain damaged? She didn't strike me as "full of grace" so much as full of the delusions of the mentally unbalanced. Really, was her strict non-verbal passivity, with big sad eyes, completely necessary for the new Malick dogma of the suffering Eve who oozes blood and cookies? Silly.

What I used to feel was a lovely connection I had with Malick films, personal and delivered with visual splendor, is now a quasi-religious diatribe. I'd be sad except Tree of Life was so preposterous I laughed.

There is nothing, philosophically, in the Tree of Life that wasn't "stated" better in The Thin Red Line or Days of Heaven, and with far more respect for the audience. I don't know what necessitates such a harangue like Tree of Life from a director who once knew how to make such lyrical cinematic poetry.

1-21-12
No, I won't be watching it again. The propaganda factor was too high for me. By the way, that's why I've never re-watched a Spielberg movie. The point is so obvious, and beaten into my head with every available tool.

It's like the difference between a dialogue and a political rally (or fundie church service.) Tree of Life is all one direction. It's a raving lecture, not a story, not a conversation with the viewer, not a subtle exposition.

The title (and watching The New World) should have been a warning. Malick wanted to fill the whole blackboard with his Big Theory. No questions allowed in this lecture!

Oh, and the wife was dopey. Wonderful. Like the artistic pantheon needs another portrait of a woman as Nature's Minion of dumb womby lurv. She might as well be a cow

1-22-012

chuck,

In no way was the family a complete archetypal creation from Jack's memory, as far as the film itself shows. Your interpretation has no in-film support from what we are given.

This film, from the get go, stated clearly that universal archetypes were being presented. No amount of wiggling is going to change the premise that Malick is laying on big Truth here, about Nature, Grace, God, Women, Men, Children, Dogs, Trees, Dinner, Music...

That was his clear intention.

So, he intended this Mother Thing to be a passive beast of emotional anguish and simple minded, mute, reaction.

Even women from the 50's had a greater range of emotion and intellect that this woman showed. Even if they were encouraged to be pretty children with wombs full of lurv, the reality is far more complex, though that would apparently contradict the emblem of Truthiness Mr. Malick wished to give us.