Unstuck in time

Terrence Malick reckons time differently from most of us. The director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, this year’s The Tree of Life and — well, that’s pretty much all of it — makes films at a glacial pace. And they’re meant to be viewed that way. Example: he spent 30 years or so piecing together bits and pieces for The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or award at Cannes this year and now plays in Manila.

Some people are baffled by it. A Brad Pitt movie with little story or plot? No romance? Whaaaa? There have been walkouts in Manila cinemas. Some places have cancelled screenings due to low attendance.

Thirty years to shoot a movie? Hey, we’re still waiting for My Bloody’s Valentine’s follow-up to 1990’s “Loveless.” These things take time. In between, Malick gave us Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith in a meditative love story called The New World, and a meditative war movie called The Thin Red Line. Here’s what you can expect from Terrence Malick movies: voiceover narrative that’s sparse, told from many different angles, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps, like a Gestalt image; shots of nature that are breathtaking, National Geographic quality, but also intimate glimpses of frogs and lizards poised on tree branches, of life quietly unfolding on this planet; music that’s undulating, like Wagner’s Vorspiel in The New World, or the Philip Glass-like score by Alexandre Desplat in Tree of Life.

Mother figure: Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O’Brien

There is a story. Father Pitt and wife Jessica Chastain are the O’Briens, raising three boys in 1950s Waco, Texas, one of whom we learn has died at age 19. Sean Penn appears in moody, disconnected shots in an office building, talking about how he still thinks about his lost brother every day. We get backward glances at their lives together, and learn how strict a father was Pitt — a plant engineer who files patents on inventions and plays Bach organ pieces on the side. But all is revealed in oblique, discontinuous shots; you can’t be expecting Transformers 3 when you sit down to a Malick film, because your head will come unscrewed.

This is non-linear filmmaking at its most uncompromising. You want to say it’s like European cinema, but even the Europeans don’t make stuff like this anymore. A film graduate told me the movie appeals to film graduates. Sure, but it’s not just an expensive student film. It’s beautiful, but you’re reluctant to put a label on it.

Let’s start, though, with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not coincidentally, the amazing special effects in both of these movies were conceived and shot by Douglas Trumbull. In fact, halfway through the universe-creation sequence, I thought someone had slipped a reel of 2001 into the projector by mistake. I kid you not: a few seconds after a voiceover speaker says, “How did we get here?” the movie shifts into trippy universe-creation mode. We see the Big Bang. We watch pieces of the universe drift and roil and collect into galaxies of stars; we watch the Earth erupt and congeal and cool down, and life begin to burble up out of rich protein stews. Strangely, we see dinosaurs roaming about — definitely a first in a Malick movie. But this ain’t Jurassic Park. (Though one viewer hoped that the dinosaur would receive its own voiceover narration.)

The creation scenes are utterly amazing. Malick, an old friend of Trumbull’s, was disappointed with modern CGI and asked Trumbull to do the special effects “the old way”: using “chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography” (according to Wikipedia) to create the awesome visuals of infinite space settling down into matter. Expect another Oscar for Trumbull next year.

But Malick’s own images are no less astonishing. A flock of birds bobbing and weaving around a skyscraper has an incredible poetic resonance — somehow evoking souls in flight, 9/11, and the convergence of man and nature, all in a single continuous shot. Lizards and frogs make a cameo appearance, as they often do in Malick movies. Underwater shots simulate the birth process, as a boy leaves a submerged room, complete with tables, lamps and framed pictures, to enter into the external world. Chastain, playing Mrs. O’Brien, does a great job portraying the kind of Earth Mother who understands the essence of life intuitively — though Pitt’s character calls her “naïve,” and insists “you can’t be too good in this life and succeed.”

I want you to hit me as hard as you can: Brad Pitt as stern Mr. O’Brien, trying to toughen up his boys in The Tree of Life.

On some level, what we have here is a high-tech, infinite-reaching retelling of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. In the opening monologue, the mother explains the duality — nature versus grace — and you can see how mankind is constantly given the option to choose one or the other in the brief parade of life. Malick’s sympathies obviously lie with the latter: searching for some meaning, beyond pure survival of the fittest. There’s also the classic Cain and Abel scenario here: older brother Jack is jealous of the middle son, who plays guitar, is favored by the dad, and is clearly more artistic. Jack is more of the earth, tempted by the world’s sins, always seeking validation from Pitt’s stern patriarch.

The way in which Tree of Life soars into 2001 territory is in its loose-limbed appreciation of time: people are born, people die, civilizations come and go; but space and time are infinite. Our understanding of all we perceive must emerge from that truth.

Like 2001, Malick’s epic journey has also been accused of pretentiousness, and was jeered by some at Cannes (despite winning the top honors). It really just depends on what kind of viewpoint you have while looking at it.

There’s also that scene where a predator dinosaur wanders through a forest as majestic as anything created by Avatar’s CGI crew. Yet it’s clearly a real, earthbound forest. The dinosaur — a troodon — comes across a wounded parasaurolophus lying in a stream (streams, rivers and brooks are also key motifs for Malick). He places a taloned foot on the fallen creature’s neck, considers making it his lunch; then thinks better of it, removes his foot, wanders offscreen. You don’t know if it’s nature at work, contained in that one choice — a dinosaur’s instinctual shrinking away from something that’s dying, that could potentially cause it illness — or if it’s grace: the ability to grant mercy to another living thing, to understand the cosmic chain of being on some level. And you also think of Kubrick’s Monolith in 2001, and how it created a total mind-shift among the primate creatures that came into its presence. Malick — bless his glacial heart — is something like that Monolith. Awe-inspiring. Mind-shifting.