Jesse Kornbluth explores two powerful films.
___
“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” grossed $73 million last weekend, but it’s not the hottest movie in America. That is “Boyhood,” which opened in a handful of cities — it opened in many more on Friday; here’s a list — and grossed only a few hundred thousand dollars.
What’s the film about?
In 2002, Richard Linklater hired Ellar Coltrane, a 6-year-old Texas boy, to make a film about 12 years in the life of a Texas boy and his family. Every year, Coltrane, the director’s daughter, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke would film for three of four days. Cut together, Linklater would have a film that delivered… well, life.
The idea was daring. The budget was tiny: $5 million over 12 years. The effect was unprecedented.
On Rotten Tomatoes, “Boyhood” got an unreal 100% approval rating and a rave of a blurb: “epic in technical scale but breathlessly intimate in narrative scope.”
In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis confessed that she’d seen the film three times — and it’s not enough: “I haven’t fully figured out why it has maintained such a hold on me, and why I’m eager to see it again.”
My wife, the small person and I saw the film on Saturday night in a sold-out art house. It was an odd experience — nothing really “happens” in the film. The boy plays, goes to school, gets older, drinks and smokes weed, and you wait for the cops to show up at Arquette’s door, but everybody gets home safely, every time. Arquette and Hawke, divorced before the film starts, create a functional partnership when Hawke abandons unrealistic dreams and becomes responsible — a man, a good man. Arquette makes two bad marriages, but she gets out of them and forges a career.
And that’s Linklater’s message: The small moments in life are the big moments. We become who we are day by day, just by being alive. Yes, we’re shaped by every interaction. Yes, the divine lives in the ordinary. The meaning of life? It’s right in front of you. It’s…. now.
On the way home, my wife nailed it: “I understand the appeal of ‘Boyhood’ and I’m glad we saw it, but isn’t it really the same movie as ‘Tree of Life?’”
Yes. It is. And while I encourage you to see “Boyhood” — something tells me it’s more satisfying than “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”— what I really want you to do is watch Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”
In 2011 “The Tree of Life” won the Palme D’Or for Best Picture at Cannes, but even with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn in the film, it didn’t lure crowds into the theaters. The director’s reclusiveness is part of the explanation — Malick’s last interview was in the 1970s; he’d made just five films in 38 years — but the better reason is that “The Tree of Life” is intellectually compelling and emotionally overpowering but not exactly popcorn entertainment.
There’s no plot; the story reveals itself, incompletely, in fits and starts, and if you drift off or leave the theater for more caffeine, you might miss an important moment. You won’t think Aaron Sorkin had anything to do with the dialogue; these characters talk more in voice-overs than they do to one another. And talk is the least of it; the unfolding images lead you deep into the film, and yourself. And most of the music is classical.
Years after seeing it, I’m still haunted by this movie. Its images float through my dreams. When I look at our daughter, I sometimes think of the children in Malick’s film. [To buy the DVD of ‘Tree of Life’ from Amazon, click here. To buy or rent the streaming video, click here.]
Yes, like “Boyhood,” it’s a family story. But Brad Pitt is embittered. He should have been a classical pianist, but he made the practical choice and gets a regular paycheck, and that enrages him. Men no better than he got lucky and made fortunes; the best he can hope for is that his kids grow up strong and successful.
Jessica Chastain, his wife, has other ideas; she teaches her children the power of love.
Grief also lives in this house; one son has died. That’s not just an easy plot point. Malick, who had a tough father and grew up in Texas, had a brother who killed himself at 19 and another who died after a car crash. Malick also went to Harvard and was a Rhodes Scholar; at Oxford, he began a thesis about the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. So you don’t get a literal family story here. You get the beginning of the world, dinosaurs, gorgeous images — and a small boy at the center of the film asking big questions: Where are You? Why are we here?
All that’s the background, the context. In the foreground, we watch children at play. These are moments so beyond anything I’ve seen in films that they’re breathtaking — even though all the kids are doing is running around or playing in the bathtub or getting into typical kid trouble. Real life, closely observed. Innocence, celebrated.
Films are rarely this ambitious, and, most of the time, we don’t want them to be. With good reason: we’re scared to know what we think, we desperately don’t want to look up at the stars and confront how very small we are. “The Tree of Life” goes there, and stays there. It’s a forced meditation. And it shreds you.
It shreds you even though I suspect the “answer” that Malick is driving toward is inspiring — I look at the many scenes of people touching, holding one another, affirming the most basic connection, and I conclude that the film is a hymn to the beauty of the world and the power of love.
“Someday we’ll fall down and weep, and we’ll understand it all, all things, “ Pitt says. At the end, Sean Penn — the boy, now grown — drops to his knees. In awe? In gratitude? In, just possibly, understanding? I don’t know. I do know “The Tree of Life” had me on my knees.
And not just me. Here’s Roger Ebert:
Malick’s new film is a form of prayer…. What he does in “The Tree of Life” is create the span of lives. Of birth, childhood, the flush of triumph, the anger of belittlement, the poison of resentment, the warmth of forgiving. And he shows that he feels what I feel, that it was all most real when we were first setting out, and that it will never be real in that way again…..
Really? That good? That important? If you do nothing else, take nine minutes and watch the ending:
____
This article originally appeared on The Head Butler.