The Tree of Life

2011 // USA // Terrence Malick // September 1, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

I first encountered The Tree of Life four months ago, and given the primacy of the parent-child relationship in Terrence Malick's lauded film, part of me assumed that revisiting the film following the birth of my son would permit me to appreciate it in fresh ways. And, truth be told, the affecting quality of the film's suburban Waco scenes was intensified, if only because I found myself reflecting that much more intently on the ways in which my wife's and my outlook will inevitably mold our son's character. Young Jack's matter-of-fact statement of his revelation to his father, "I'm more like you than her," is an expression of the narrative nucleus of the Waco sequences. Indeed, the importance of this declaration is the reason that the last year of the O'Brien's residency in the little corner house figures so prominently in adult Jack's reverie. The pivotal events from that time period—the death of a local boy in a public pool, Jack's theft of a neighbor's lingerie (and possible first masturbatory experience), Jack's shooting of his brother with a pellet gun—all lead in some way to Jack's revelation that he is his father's son, i.e. more a spirit of Nature than Grace.

In addition, there were details that I caught on my second go-around that deepened my appreciation of the film. For example, the context of the more perplexing imagery early in Jack's memories—such as the children following a woman through a forest, or a boy swimming through a drowned house—makes it clear that what we are seeing is a metaphorical expression of the pre-birth experience. (This, in turn, reinforces my suspicions that the film's final sequences are a highly symbolic conception of the afterlife, or at least the afterlife as Jack hopes it will be.)

In the main, however, my initial impressions, articulated in my conversation with fellow Look/Listen writer Patricia Brooke, were essentially reinforced with a second viewing. I remain fascinated with the pure visual poetry of those extensive Waco sequences, which are realistic while also conveying the disconnected and dreamy quality of half-remembered times. If one considers the depiction of the O'Brien family as a standalone object, I'm tempted to call it the most successful use of Malick's unconventional editing methods (here implemented by a five-person team of editors) in his entire filmography. Jack's memories take on the quality of a collage of moving snapshots, assembled in roughly chronological order. In some ways, the experience of the film is therefore like flipping through a family photo album, with the expected lingering over memories that are especially potent. This approach allows Malick to achieve a glinting, unabashedly nostalgic depiction of a lost American landscape, and yet also infuse it with the sort of melancholy that any journey through an intensely personal past can achieve. In this, the best moments of The Tree of Life share a common character with Terence Davies' superlative documentary memoir, Of Time and the City.

I remain, however, generally unmoved by Malick's joining of Jack's conflicted inner odyssey to cosmological ruminations on the nature of God and existence. I chalk that up partly to my own suspicion of earnestly presented spirituality, and partly to the inadequacy of Malick's method. It's certainly possible to be touched by a work of cinema that expresses a worldview dissimilar to one' own. Heck, Malick's own The Thin Red Line ultimately seems to side (narrowly) with Private Witt's theistic, anti-materialist view of the human experience, which I reject and yet still found deeply affecting. In The Tree of Life, however, while I clearly understood what Malick was trying to achieve with his images of nebulae and jellyfish, I found little resonance in those visuals. Where some have seen a profound expression of vexing philosophical concerns, I see a handsome illustration of a deistic worldview that is self-evidently dead on arrival.

Moreover, the director's decision to expand the scope of his observations beyond the immediate environs of his characters, to encompass all physical reality, seems to have heightened his taste for the grandiose even as it diminished his focus. One of the primary factors that makes his previous films such innovative and entrancing works of cinematic art is how he utilizes the local surroundings to establish an "ecological" narrative that is just as vital as the human-centered narrative. (The former, it should be stated, can consist of human-made environments, such as Days of Heaven's steel mill.) Freed by computer technology to explore the outermost reaches of the cosmos and the innermost workings of a living cell, Malick seems to struggle a bit more to connect his images back to the O'Briens and Jack's inner turmoil. For me, the paradox of The Tree of Life is that Jack's memories have a palpable aura of the sacred, while the film's visions of spinning galaxies and stalking dinosaurs strike me as somewhat antiseptic. They effectively remove me from the embrace of the cinematic experience rather than providing a macroscopic counterpoint to Jack's story, which strikes me as the opposite of the intended effect.

Another Earth

2011 // USA // Mike Cahill // August 12, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

​Another Earth is speculative science fiction stripped down to its most essential characteristic: The employment of scientific principles as a plot device in order to explore the philosophical facets of an otherwise human-centered narrative. In the case of Mike Cahill’s subtle, intriguing little film, the "science" in question is of the thinnest and most fantastical sort. A twin Earth has appeared in the sky, and over the course of the film this doppelganger planet looms larger and larger, all without any apparent gravitational effect on our Earth. Naturally, such a conceit makes zero sense from an astronomical standpoint, but Another Earth is really a flirtation with the fuzzier quasi-scientific notion of parallel universes. When the director of SETI makes first contact with “Earth 2” on a national television broadcast, she quickly discovers that she is talking to another version of herself. Members of a New England family watching this exchange from their living room give voice to the viewer’s probable reaction: “I don’t understand--What does that mean?”

This is lofty stuff for a low-budget indie. Cahill and lead performer / co-writer Brit Marling have neither the means nor the interest to peer in on the urgent White House meetings and radical research projects that such a miracle would engender. Like Signs and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Cahill's film assumes a ground-level viewpoint for its extraordinary events. In this case, our witness is Rhoda (Marling), an MIT-bound astrophysics student whose life becomes entwined with that of the twin planet on the eve of its first appearance. Craning to catch a glimpse of this new celestial orb while speeding home from a night of drunken revelry, Rhoda collides with a car carrying a family of three, killing the young son and wife of a Yale musicologist, John (William Mapother). Four years later, a private spaceflight company is arranging the first manned mission to Earth 2, just as Rhoda is paroled from a manslaughter sentence. Adrift and addled with guilt, she tracks down John in order to ask for forgiveness, but loses her nerve at the last minute. Through a series of misunderstandings and deceptions, she then finds herself working as John’s house cleaner, and the two eventually form a guarded but much-needed friendship. In the meantime, Rhoda enters an essay contest to win a seat on the voyage to Earth 2, a hopeful act that not only speaks to her childhood yearning for the stars, but also her pained curiosity about a universe in which her life followed a different course.

One doesn’t need a compass and protractor to see where this is going: Rhoda and John realize that they are falling in love right around the time that Rhoda wins the aforementioned contest, much to her (but not the audience’s) astonishment. Strictly as a narrative about remorse and absolution, Another Earth is pretty standard indie drama material—more Sundance than Solaris, if you will. The film blunders into eye-rolling cliché at times, e.g. an elderly janitor who serves no purpose other than to reflect Rhoda’s despair and to periodically mumble half-baked wisdom. Fortunately, the science fiction angle to the story saves Another Earth from its own conventional outlines. Rhoda’s tribulations are unquestionably the focus of the film, but Earth 2 is always there, filling every exterior shot with the sheer impossible fact of its existence and thereby coloring the terrestrial proceedings. As it happens, this also allows for some glorious visuals of the second Earth against an azure sky, including a shot that explicitly evokes La Jetée / Dark City / Twelve Monkeys. (Such hyper-real daylight imagery contrasts sharply with the smeary grain that Cahill’s digital video lends to the nocturnal scenes.)

The film’s budgetary constraints end up enhancing the uneasy tone: The planetary double, which resembles the famed Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” photo pasted into in the sky, never seems to rotate or exhibit changes in its weather, making it seem less a solid place than a portal to another reality. Adding to the film’s uncanny sense of dislodgment is the occasional voiceover narration from real-life physicist Richard E. Berendzen, who speculates poetically on the implications of parallel universes and life on other planets. Far from over-explaining the phenomenon of Earth 2 with unwelcome, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, Cahill and Marling leave nearly all the technical details unexplored. Instead, they allow snippets of possibility to seep into the minds of the characters (and the audience) from overheard television and radio programs, where experts pontificate on various theories about Earth 2. This adroit, minimalist use of science is what allows the film’s abrupt conclusion to function so well, despite the howls of confusion and anger that it will no doubt prompt from some viewers. What Cahill offers with Another Earth is, in a sense, the fundamental feat of all thoughtful science fiction: The deepening of an otherwise musty story not through smash-bang spectacle, but through Big Ideas plucked from the cosmos itself.

Project Nim

2011 // UK - USA // James Marsh // August 12, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Numerous thematic angles present themselves for exploration in the tale of Nim Chimsky, the male chimpanzee who was taught American Sign Language as a part of a contentious Columbia University language experiment in the 1970s-80s. James Marsh’s new documentary feature, Project Nim, emphasizes the colorful characters associated with the experiment, as well as the moral conundrums that swirl around the chimp’s treatment, often to the exclusion of the story’s academic context and ramifications. How the experiment fit into the then-contemporary research landscape of linguistics and cognition is not touched upon. However, the film ably reveals the ad-hoc resourcefulness and suspect ethics that characterized the project’s day-to-day routine. From these details, a picture emerges of a research project which was seemingly blessed with resounding success, despite its disorganization and soapy conflicts. Nim’s signing vocabulary is envisioned as a line that climbs ever upward, representing the remarkable progress of a bevy of teachers, all working under the eye (and thumb) of psychology professor Herbert Terrace. However, Project Nim clearly signals through its stylistic particulars that its aim is not a celebration of the titular chimp’s intellect, but a fairly grim condemnation of the human participants.

Marsh relies upon archival materials and recreations to supplement extensive interviews with the academics and caretakers who interacted with Nim on a regular basis. The director allows his subjects to tell Nim’s story in their own words, but hardly anyone (save the chimpanzee) emerges looking particularly honorable, least of all Terrace, who projects a tweedy sort of exploitative arrogance. This suits the film’s purpose well enough, as Project Nim isn’t striving for a work of explanatory journalism or a profound rumination on language. What Marsh presents is a disconcerting tragedy about humankind’s relationship to a wild animal that it psychologically sculpted for woolly scientific ends. The film’s central criticism of the experiment only becomes evident after the project’s funding evaporates and Nim becomes too large and aggressive for the researchers to handle. The once-renowned ape is then shuttled to a succession of unpleasant confinements and abusive environments, culminating in the horrors of an NYU medical testing facility. It's all presented for maximum pathos, sometimes manipulatively so, but Marsh is not aiming for anything as prosaic as a work of animal right agitprop. The specificity of the film is the key to its emotional and moral strength. Project Nim poses that the experiment altered Nim’s development, rendering him unfit to abruptly re-enter a caged existence with his fellow chimps. While steering clear of righteous snottiness, Marsh unambiguously presents Nim’s plight as the direct result of unmet human obligations. That Nim was subject to a litany of psychological and physical abuse after he outgrew his usefulness is framed as an unforgivable disgrace, and justly so.

Tabloid

2010 // USA // Errol Morris // August 7, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

One of the more striking aspects of Errol Morris’ delightfully nutty new documentary, Tabloid, is how closely the film’s thematic concerns track with those of the director’s previous effort, the absorbing and incisive Standard Operating Procedure. The latter film affirmed that what went on behind closed doors at the Abu Ghraib prison was, if anything, stranger than what one might conclude from those notorious photographs of naked prisoners and grinning MPs. However, even at its most bizarre, the Abu Ghraib scandal doesn’t hold a candle to the story of Tabloid, a globetrotting farce that encompasses a beauty queen, Mormon missionaries, unrequited love, kidnapping, a sheepdog, BDSM sex, a vicious British tabloid war, and a South Korean cloning laboratory. Still, the most prominent commonality between the two films isn’t the stranger-than-fiction quality of the events they depict, but how Morris employs those events to explore the slippery nature of truth, and to illustrate how maddening it can be to resolve limited and often contradictory evidence into a coherent narrative. Such matters, of course, have been a perennial fascination of Morris’ since the The Thin Blue Line. (Which, incidentally, has the moral distinction of being a work of cinema that arguably saved a person’s life.)

Tabloid’s concerns, however, are far less grave than a wrongful murder conviction or a shadow program of prisoner torture. In truth, I’m reluctant to summarize Tabloid's story in greater detail, as one of the central pleasures of the film is the sensation of pure astonishment as Morris reveals each new demented twist. The tale will be familiar to British filmgoers who recall when the Daily Mirror recounted every jot for weeks on end in 1977-1978. However, for the rest of Tabloid’s viewers, the story will be a tawdry roller coaster of peculiar details and flabbergasting revelations. Suffice to say that at the eye of the film’s hurricane sits Joyce McKinney, a figure who is equal parts spellbinding, baffling, and utterly unbearable. Tabloid is, in essence, her story, told in her own words and supplemented (and refuted) with the words of associates, experts, and journalists. One can easily discern what attracted Morris to McKinney as a documentary subject: She combines magnetic charisma, giggly eccentricities, relentless self-absorption, and a disconcerting lack of remorse. Frankly, she seems barking mad, and yet adept at cloaking herself in romantic idealism and folksy turns of phrase. Ultimately, the film can’t help but convey a glimmer of sympathy for McKinney in light of the press’ remorseless (and disproportionate) trampling of her life, even when her tears are very likely of the crocodile variety.

Morris’ method is well-established at this point, although Tabloid presents some slight variations on that method. The bulk of the film consists of talking-head interviews filmed with the director’s signature “Interrotron," which allows the subject to look directly into the camera in a naturalistic, conversational manner. The director intersperses this interview footage with archival materials, brisk special effects, pithy sound cues, and ironic bits of stock footage. Unlike some of Morris’ features, Tabloid abstains from stylized recreations. Instead, the film utilizes droll animated sequences based on the graphical style of the British tabloids, and even employs actual clippings as animation elements. This suits Tabloid’s tone of bewildered amusement, and lends it the kind of distinctive formal flourish that documentaries about sensational crimes rarely boast. As in The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure, Morris’ presence is limited to the odd, off-screen question, usually delivered in an incredulous tone. This neatly encapsulates the first-order appeal of Tabloid—the allure of that which seems beyond belief—and also the particular brilliance of the filmmaker's approach. Morris' estimable ability to coax profound themes from oddball portraits and scathing exposés alike would not be half as effective, were he not so self-evidently intrigued on a personal level by the stories he tells.

Point Blank

2010 // France // Fred Cavayé // August 2, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

It’s challenging to find anything to actively dislike about a work as functional and ably presented as Fred Cavayé’s breathless crime thriller, Point Blank. The film blends a noir-tinted story with the sort of frenetic Continental chases and standoffs that will likely have viewers searching in vain for Liam Neeson’s stern visage. In his absence, we have Gilles Lolouche portraying staunch Everyman Samuel, a nurse ensnared by pure happenstance into a world of violent fugitives, murdered millionaires, and corrupt officials. Clocking in at an agreeably brisk 84 minutes, the film boasts a trim unfussiness that expunges unnecessary scenes and dialogue. That said, Point Blank is so rigorously unadventurous in its narrative that one can’t help but feel a touch dissatisfied. Almost every set piece and plot twist that Cavayé and co-writer Guillaume Lemans employ has been presented elsewhere with far more verve and style, and the script’s hackneyed tendencies have a troublesome habit of short-circuiting tension. Case in point: The opening scenes of domestic contentment between Samuel and his pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya) virtually guarantee that she will soon be placed in mortal peril, and will eventually emerge unscathed. Capable action sequences can’t elevate a film this formulaic above mere utilitarian genre escapism. Fortunately, even within this context, there are modest pleasures, such as an enticing turn from Roschdy Zem as an unruffled safe-cracker, or a nerve-jangling climactic scene in a bustling police station.

Terri

2011 // USA // Azazel Jacobs // July 26, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Around the time I first started this blog, I was pursuing a little mission to view every feature film released theatrically in the U.S. in 2007 that had scored 70 or higher on Metacritic.  That idiosyncratic task proved to be more formidable than I first imagined, not only because that seemingly narrow list actually encompassed 144 films, but also because it included many features that were devilishly difficult to find (or outright unavailable) on DVD.  One of those elusive films was Azazel Jacobs’ ultra-low-budget experimental feature The Goodtimeskid, a film that was shot in 2005 and then given a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it release on the Coasts in 2007.  Although Benten and Watchmaker Films finally provided The Goodtimeskid with a DVD release in 2009, I still haven’t seen the damn thing.  Which I suppose illustrates that being denied access to a film has an insidious inertia that eventually saps away one’s motivation to see said film.

It’s a safe bet that lack of availability won’t be a problem for Jacobs’ films in the future, given the unassuming critical success of 2008’s Momma’s Man and the Sundance-friendly contours of his latest feature, the realist high school dramedy Terri.  John C. Reilly provides the obligatory dose of down-to-earth star power for first-time screenwriter Patrick DeWitt’s tale of an overweight teen (Jacob Wysocki) and his everyday travails. Terri is the sort of dreary loner whose misery is partly due to hard-luck circumstances beyond his control, but also partly due to his own unpleasantly dyspeptic demeanor.  Serving as the sole caregiver for an elderly uncle suffering from dementia (Creed Bratton) and apparently bereft of friends or interests, Terri seems on the cusp of giving up on life in general.  His grades are slipping, he’s perpetually tardy for school, and he’s taken to wearing rumpled pajamas as his everyday outfit.  (“They’re just comfortable,” he matter-of-factly explains.)

Jacobs’ approach is decidedly unhurried and observational, while lightly indulging in the conventions of indie dramedy: oddball character embellishments, a folksy musical score, and suspiciously opportune plot developments.  The director evenly scrutinizes Terri’s interactions with his uncle, schoolmates, teachers, and the natural world—embodied in a wooded tract between his house and the high school—to establish the rotund teen’s psychological terrain.  If Terri is a bit unreadable in the film’s early scenes, it has less to do with Wysocki’s fittingly slack gaze than with the absence of any sounding-board in his life.  The viewer is left to discern what they will from his introverted eccentricities, such as a penchant for constructing fortresses out of his home economics supplies, or a brief interest in trapping attic-dwelling mice and feeding their furry little carcasses to hawks.

Inasmuch as the film has a plot, it concerns the disruption of Terri’s sad-sack, downward-spiraling routine that occurs when the avuncular, sympathetic assistant principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (Reilly), takes an interest in his well-being.  This new relationship, which Terri approaches with a mixture of wariness and gratitude, sets into motion events that nudge other students into his normally lonely social orbit.  These include the scrawny, tightly-wound delinquent Chad (Bridger Zadina), as well as blonde cutie-pie Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), freshly relegated to the bottom of the school’s totem pole due to a scandalous classroom sex act.  The radiant Heather’s budding friendship with Terri has a whiff of a male misfit wish-fulfillment, but DeWitt’s dialog blessedly refrains from drawing attention to the improbability of their Popular Girl / Fat Kid pairing.  Although the film is decidedly male-focused, Heather is effectively (albeit subtly) employed to probe at a variety of feminist concerns, from sexual coercion to slut-shaming to the Nice Guy phenomenon.

Blackly comical portraits of life on the margins of the adolescent mainstream have been ubiquitous in American indie cinema for the past two decades, to the point that most contemporary entries are downright tedious.  However, despite Terri’s reliance on generic formulas, the reserved quality of Jacobs’ method is refreshing.  Forgoing overt pathos, vicious miserablism, or ostentatious displays of geek-chic, the film has a quiet economy that impresses.  Within the dryly amusing spectacle of Terri wrestling to find his place in the world, Jacobs finds expression for several key themes.  Most prominently, the film asserts that the right course of action is a murky thing in a complex world, a notion that Mr. Fitzgerald voices and also embodies. Although perceptive and generous, the assistant principal is shown to be a flawed man who bends the rules, makes biased assumptions, and fumbles through his own personal life.  Terri also serves as a rather blunt examination of how societies react to individuals that breach physical, mental, or behavioral norms, and how outcasts struggle to establish a tense hierarchy of their own.  The term “monster” crops up with sufficient frequency that a genderqueer reading of the film doesn’t seem all that outlandish.  Regardless, it’s gratifying to see a work examine teen ostracism with a genuinely sensitive gaze, and without resorting to the grating clichés that seem to plague features with similar aims.