The Tree of... Huh?

With the Academy Awards fast approaching, Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life has emerged as a strong contender for Best Picture. Oscar Blog InContention's Kris Tapley wrote as convincing an argument for the film winning the award as one might find.

  

While I respect his opinion and find it perfectly valid, it is also completely wrong; The Tree of Life is an undeniably bad film. It is guilty of a number of filmmaking infractions, any of which individually render a film painful to watch, nevermind in aggregate. 

The violations...

1.) There is NO narrative structure. Nothing ever happens to set any semblance of a story into motion. There are no character arcs. Any scene could conceivably be placed anywhere in the film; no scene is begotten by the previous, nor begets the one that follows. The film moves from scenes of the grown protagonist to his childhood and back again, the only common bond being that we're seeing the same people over and over again. What happens in one scene has absolutely no effect on the next, nor deals with the consequences (which are few) of the prior.

2.) (Whispering) Voiceover. One of the immutable laws of filmmaking: any movie relying largely on VO is weak by definition. Stories are told by the juxtaposition of images, the cuts, not disembodied voices. In this case, when the director adds the staggeringly pretentious element of recording all the dropped-in dialogue in barely (if at all) discernible whispers, it descends to an unprecedented low.

3.) Running Time. If you're going to make us sit and watch for 2 hours & 19 minutes, at least let us feel like you needed all that time to get your point across. I estimate roughly 30 to 45 minutes of TOL could've been cut and it would've still achieved what it set out to do... whatever that is. Case in point: The Dark Knight ran 13 minutes longer and The Godfather 36, however both earned and warranted our attention for the entire duration.

And most importantly...

4.) It was a TOTAL cop-out. There is absolutely no consensus between those who viewed TOL as to the simple question of what happens. To ask ten different people who saw the film, "what's it about?" is to receive ten different answers. The story (in this case, a term used very loosely) is left completely up to interpretation. The director fails in the most literal sense of his job; he fails to direct the audience through his film. This is not to be confused with complexity; it is nothing more than ambiguity. Films that are complex bring everyone to the same point, leaving the journey up for analysis and questioning. This film doesn't even commit to where we end up.

If I were to guess, I'd say Malick winged it. He didn't know exactly where this was going on-set, and what we have is what he came up with in the editing room.

As to the assertion that this is "art," therein lies a whole different issue. Filmmaking is a craft; it's never supposed to be art. Y'know what though? I could see The Tree of Life working better as a walk-through installation than it does as a film.

*****

So now you see, factual evidence as to why this is a bad film. But film criticism is subjective, right? How can someone's opinion be wrong? Because it can be. I direct you to the late Gene Siskel, who put it best when he said "There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact. When you say The Valachi Papers is a better film than The Godfather, you are wrong." (I've never seen The Valachi Papers, but I'm pretty sure Siskel nails it here.) Likewise, there are people of the opinion that dinosaurs walked the earth with man. Their opinions too, are wrong.

But if I'm correct, why then is TOL praised at all? Some people, like Roger Ebert, were reminded of their own childhoods in the 1950s; victims of their own nostalgia. Master screenwriter William Goldman once said that some movies are "medicinal," meaning that people like them because they think they should. Because of Terrance Malick's reputation, I think a lot of people were psychologically predisposed to liking this movie because they believed liking it made them deep and intellectual. (It doesn't.)

The Tree of Life is what Adaptation would've been had Charlie Kaufman not done us all the service of writing himself into the screenplay: flowing, digressive prose with no real purpose. It is vague, noncommittal and devoid of plot. It's also perfectly okay to like it. 

Hey, I like some bad movies too. I just always acknowledge they are as such.

(Note: This was written in response to my general feelings about the movie, not in particular as a backlash to Kris Tapley's column. Admittedly, reading his piece did ignite a fire in me to write something, but it is in no way intended to be directed at him. I've actually met Kris on a few occasions and hold no ill-will against him.)