The Tree of Life
Produced by Cottonwood Pictures and River Road Entertainment
Written and directed by Terrence Malick
Distributed by Fox Searchlight Entertainment

Midnight in Paris
Produced by Letty Aronson
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics

 

Evelyn Waugh once remarked that, while reading Ulysses, one could watch James Joyce going mad, sentence by sentence.  I felt the same way about Terrence Malick while watching The Tree of Life.  Frame by frame, I grew increasingly uneasy about Malick’s sanity.  He’s clearly a talented filmmaker who has much on his mind, so much that it has strained his wits to the snapping point.  He has no sense of balance or proportion.  Worse, he’s absolutely devoid of humor, as he has already proved in his earlier films, especially The Thin Red Line, his perverse misadaptation of James Jones’ novel.

In Tree Malick has attempted to tell the story of a modern-day Job living in Waco, Texas, the city of his own upbringing.  The resulting film mixes overwrought melodrama with visualizations of the origin of the universe done in the National Geographic mode.  It’s an attempt, I suppose, to place the viewer at the intersection of the quotidian and the cosmic.

The narrative, if that’s what to call it, opens in the large, suburban home of the O’Briens, whose name I had to discover in the credits.  It was never mentioned in the film, as far as I could tell.  Of course, I may be wrong.  Much of the dialogue and stream-of-consciousness voice-overs (a Malick specialty) are garbled, whispered, or cut short.  Anyway, the O’Briens’ home is an all-glass-and-light affair, and the time seems to be the early 70’s.  A telegram arrives bearing the news that their 19-year-old son is dead.  At the funeral one of the neighbors utters the usual bromides.  “He’s in God’s hands now. . . . The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”  But later, in a whispered voice-over, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) addresses a question to his dead son: “How did you come to me?”  Implicit in his question is the Job-like demand for a divine accounting.  Not only how but why did this child come, only to be cut down 19 years later?  Then with staggering literalism, Malick tells us just how.

The screen turns black, save for a reddish swirl of pulsing light in its center, which will reappear unexplained at key points.  (Later, you’re led to believe it’s the beating heart of all that is, or some such thing.)  This is followed by an extended sequence of cosmic explosions and wheeling galaxies.  Soon we’re on a volcano-pocked planet whose general conflagration finally gives way to brutal storms.  Life appears in the form of jellyfish that evolve into more complex marine life.  Amphibious creatures crawl onto beaches; soon dinosaurs begin hopping about a swampy tract reminiscent of the remotest depths of the Everglades.  So this is how the boy came to the O’Briens.  He was, as the scientists have trained us to believe, a product of billions of years of evolution.  Curiously, Malick cuts the evolutionary process short, stopping with the dinos, after which we’re whisked forward to witness the birth of Jack, the dead son’s older brother.  But wait: If we’re pinning it all on evolution, what about the chimps?  Didn’t they contribute their mite to bringing forth the boy?  And what about later developments?  The Sermon on the Mount, the Protestant Reformation, the Second Continental Congress?  Surely, these episodes must have exerted their influences.  But Malick capriciously ignores the rest of evolution and history.  This is his artistic privilege, of course, and so is his refusal to tell us all but one of the O’Briens’ names and many of the basic facts of their existence.  I wondered what Mr. O’Brien did for a living at the company whose shop floor we see him walk from time to time.  He seems to be an inventor involved with aviation, but we’re never told.  At one point he travels around the world with a briefcase filled with plans of some sort.  What are they?  Whatever they are, he seems unable to promote them successfully.  He returns thinking of himself as a failure.  Is this true?  As for his son, we’re never told how and where he meets his death.  Was he in the Vietnam War, or was he mugged on the streets of New York?

We do learn that O’Brien has a troubled relationship with his sons, especially the oldest, Jack.  He’s something of a martinet.  The boys must keep their elbows off the dinner table and call him Father, not Dad.  These scenes are dramatized to make O’Brien appear as the stereotype of a 1950’s father, a man obsessed with keeping good order in his home and seeing to the proper upbringing of his children.  Somehow thwarted in his profession, O’Brien seems to take out his frustrations on his boys—or is he just worried that they, too, will wind up unsuccessful if he doesn’t challenge them while they are young?  All the while, his face is clenched, his chin jutted against the inequities he suffers.  Are we to sympathize with him or think him a miserable jerk?  And just what are these inequities?  Only two examples are provided.  His lawn has a bare patch, while his neighbor’s doesn’t.  As he explains to Jack, the neighbor has more money than he does, and, what’s more, he didn’t earn it himself.  There’s also a more serious disappointment.  “I dreamed of being a great musician,” he tells Jack, “but I let myself get sidetracked.”  We hear him playing piano at home and the organ at church, but there’s no indication that he has the talent to become a first-class musician.  All in all, we don’t have much to go on to make a judgment about O’Brien.

Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), on the other hand, is a lovely, nurturing woman, who tries to soften her husband’s rougher edges while protecting the boys from his occasional outbursts.  There’s a domestic drama here, but it’s told in such an oblique, elliptical manner that we’re at a loss to know what to make of it.  To add to the mystery, Malick tosses us into and out of his scenes as his camera dives into events in media res and then leaves them before they’re finished.  All we’re given by way of explanation are his patented whispered voice-overs, which are often impossible to connect with particular speakers.  Then there’s the grown-up Jack (Sean Penn), a man now in his 50’s who occasionally appears pacing the hallways of a cold, antiseptic glass tower, presumably in Houston.  These scenes are to little point other than to show Jack’s extraordinarily sour expression.  Is he angry, bereaved, depressed, constipated?  Who knows?

So what’s this all about?  In light of the quote from the Book of Job that begins the film (“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”), I would have to say that Malick has undertaken to ask after the meaning of life in a world that often seems filled with random suffering and little justice.  Does he get an answer?  He does, I suppose, but you have to wonder if it’s worth the getting, since it’s so ambiguous.  The movie reminded me of the early-20th-century modernist attempts to demonstrate that ultimate truth is to be found in intensely subjective experience.  In Ulysses the mental ramblings of a few Dubliners over the course of a day are made to parallel Odysseus’ ten-year journey home to Ithaca, and thus the entire heft of Western civilization.  In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves the human essence is plumbed in the nearly incommunicable musings of characters and their exquisite states of mind.  But do modernist claims convince anyone any longer?  Who reads these texts, other than graduate students of English?  Similarly, Malick’s film will be appreciated only by those capable of persuading themselves that his cinematic self-indulgence is, like a dose of castor oil, good for you, if slightly repellent.

Speaking of modernists, you’ll meet quite a few in Woody Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris.  By virtue of unexplained bouts of time travel, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) finds himself traveling back to the Paris of the 20’s again and again, where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Luis Buñuel.  And that’s just for starters.  Cole Porter shows up to play his own compositions, albeit with a far richer voice than the one with which he was blessed, if recordings can be trusted.

To tell his tale, Allen has directed Wilson to act in the now classic Allen manner.  He’s a bright but dithering nerd surrounded by insufferable bores.  He’s given to whining about his circumstances, but you forgive him because he’s so self-deprecatingly witty about it.  All in all, he seems an absurdly hopeless fellow, until by a series of improbable events he manages to trump the bores who have been imposing upon him so inexcusably.

Gil has come to despise himself for succeeding as a Hollywood scriptwriter rather than completing the novel he’s long been working on.  His would-be book is a story about a nostalgia shop.  This makes sense since he’s spent the last ten years of his life mooning over his one trip to Paris.  As luck would have it, the parents of his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), are planning to travel to Paris on business, so he and his bride-to-be decide to tag along.  Once in the City of Lights, Gil is forever saying things like “I love Paris in the rain,” to the bewilderment of his travel mates, who have much more practical aims, such as taking guided tours and shopping.  (One of their guides, easily the most beautiful, is played by First Lady Carla Bruni.  Allen must have plans to make more films in France.)

One night, while wandering the streets alone, Gil hears church bells ring at midnight, and a beautiful vintage car appears.  Its occupants turn out to be the bibulous Fitzgeralds, who take him to a party where he meets Hemingway and Stein.  It wouldn’t do to say much more, but I must report that Corey Stoll does an hilarious Hemingway, a man of stern, peremptory assertions: You cannot write well if you fear death; you can’t make love really well if you fear death.  The man’s as fully humorless as Malick.  I must mention also Marion Cotillard, who couldn’t be more charming playing one of Picasso’s mistresses.  And Adrien Brody makes Salvador Dali an artist so thoroughly astonished by his own talent that he can’t help repeating his own name at every opportunity.

Midnight in Paris may not be an important film, but it is delightful.