Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/25/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Jessica Chastain, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt
in The Tree of Life

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Fuselier, Nicolas Gonda, Will Wallace, Kelly Koonce. Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

I disliked The Tree of Life when I first saw it, finding it pretentious and overblown. Seeing it now, I can appreciate that there's a great movie tucked in among the pretentiousness, the reaching after some kind of metaphysical or theological statement. There's a gentle, subtle portrait of growing up in the film, somewhat akin to Richard Linklater's Boyhood (2014). I only wish that Terrence Malick had left the theology to the theologians, because what is overlaid on the story of the O'Brien boys and their parents is a muddle of cosmology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and a New-Agey view of the oneness of all life. Critically, the film was a huge success, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, getting three Oscar nominations (including one for best picture), and making several lists of the best films of the 21st century. It also features one of Brad Pitt's best performances, as the strict but loving father who suffers from disillusionment at the course his life has taken. I just wish more time had been spent on the backstory of Jessica Chastain's character, which is seen mostly from the rather Oedipal point of view of Jack, the oldest son who grows up to be Sean Penn. This is a very male-heavy movie.