942 The Tree of Life

[karmajuice]

Malick and Don Hertzfeldt have strikingly similar taste in classical music. He's used the Smetana in his animations before, and I know he used a tune that Malick used in The New World as well (a Wagner, I think).

Anyway: gorgeous, gorgeous trailer. I could raise a few issues regarding it but I'm willing to let it wash over me and have some faith in Malick. I can't wait to see how the family storyline intersects with the cosmic imagery, particularly where the two are combined: the room full of water, walking through the door to that desert, etc. Malick has always used nature in an evocative way, recalling the Romantics, but I can't remember anything so boldly expressionistic as we're seeing here. His use of nature is pushing into abstraction and I'm excited to see how that works for him.

[MyNameCriterionForum]

Finally, the CGI looked better in the bootleg

What CGI?

[rs98762001]

Incidentally - the first time I saw the bootleg, I couldn't get the sound to work for some reason and my reaction at that point was pretty much the same as yours.

I remember Manohla Dargis or someone stating soon after The Thin Red Line's release that it was a masterpiece as long as the sound was off. They were wrong of course, but you're not exactly alone in your view.

[Nothing]

What CGI?

The meteorite and the 2001-inspired shot look too smooth to be opticals, no?

[knives]

The Fountain had much smoother SFX and yet no CGI.

[Cde.]

There is CGI in the film, but Malick wanted its use to be minimal. It's hard to say what's optical and what's digital in the trailer.

The placeholder official site is live, with what I presume to be a clip of Desplat's score. Sounds absolutely fantastic.

[Crab Society North]

Since we're on the subject of CGI looking non CGI SFX or of little use can someone quickly direct me to an in-depth article on how the Fountain's SFX were achieved? also going to see Black Swan at midnight tonight and I cannot wait to see the Tree of Life trailer on the big screen

[James Mills]

I just can't imagine how anyone could not be ecstatically anticipatory of this film after seeing that gorgeous trailer. I've been anxiously awaiting that film for the past year+, but now I can honestly say I'm more excited about The Tree of Life than I've ever been for any movie.

[flyonthewall2983]

Just a sidenote, but I love the new Fox Searchlight logo. The background is gorgeous.

[aox]

I just can't imagine how anyone could not be ecstatically anticipatory of this film after seeing that gorgeous trailer. I've been anxiously awaiting that film for the past year+, but now I can honestly say I'm more excited about The Tree of Life than I've ever been for any movie.

Well, I can kind of speak for the contingent this post might be directed towards: I am not a Malick fan in the least. Beautiful photography in all of his films aside, Days of Heaven is his only film that I really can get into and I still have some problems with that one.

However, after seeing the trailer to The Tree of Life, I couldn't be more excited to see this film that I really haven't cared about until now. It looks marvelous even though I still don't really know what it is about. I will be seeing this in the theater.

Still think most of you are crazy for not showing even half the enthusiasm for Bela Tarr's new film as you have been for this one. Even if Tarr's last film was a dud (but arguably, so was Malick's).

[John Cope]

Still think most of you are crazy for not showing even half the enthusiasm for Bela Tarr's new film as you have been for this one. Even if Tarr's last film was a dud (but arguably, so was Malick's).

Well, I for one am certainly just as excited about the Tarr picture but the comparative visible lack of enthusiasm may simply come down to the fact that there is not a specific thread established to express it and there has been even less direct material released to date from which to respond enthusiastically. As to your other point I (for one, again) certainly don't think Tarr's last film was a dud. Far from it. I think it's as great a piece as anything he has ever done. Its comparative critical neglect remains a befuddling enigma to me.

[Tom Hagen]

I think the critical consensus has jelled pretty well around The New World over the last few years, in a way that certainly wasn't obvious upon its initial release. I know it ended up in the top ten of Film Comment's decade-end critics poll, for example.

[kemalettin]

Early poster

[flyonthewall2983]

It's been posted here already.

[rs98762001]

I think the critical consensus has jelled pretty well around The New World over the last few years, in a way that certainly wasn't obvious upon its initial release. I know it ended up in the top ten of Film Comment's decade-end critics poll, for example.

Isn't this the norm for Malick? Only Badlands got uniformly good reviews at the time of its release. I don't expect the response to Tree of Life to be any different. Like Kubrick and many others, his films evade easy and quick judgment.

[JamesF]

The placeholder official site is live, with what I presume to be a clip of Desplat's score. Sounds absolutely fantastic.

Just in case anyone wants to track down the second piece of music from the trailer, which is used on the site - it isn't by Desplat, though obviously that doesn't mean it won't be in the film. It's "Funeral March" by Patrick Cassidy, from his album Famine Rememberance.

[CircusVocabulary]

If you slow down the trailer (or just watch it very closely), on the shot of the football being thrown/swinging baseball bat, the ball seems to not make contact with the bat and not fall away in the background. Why does the football disappear in the football/baseball bat shot?

[Roger Ryan]

If you slow down the trailer (or just watch it very closely), on the shot of the football being thrown/swinging baseball bat, the ball seems to not make contact with the bat and not fall away in the background. Why does the football disappear in the football/baseball bat shot?

Having the camera pan to track the football in flight plus having the child successfully strike the ball with the bat would have been a very complicated shot. So, I imagine Malick opted to digitally insert the football to cut down on the number of takes it would have required to do the shot "for real". I'm surprised they didn't animate the bat connecting and the ball change direction.

Then again, maybe the ball is meant to disappear before he swings as some kind of metaphysical moment in the film (why is the child trying to hit a football anyway?). Another possibility is that the football has been digitally removed from the trailer because the shot, as it appears in the film, shows something happening with the ball after the swing that makes the shot more cumbersome to edit at the point that the trailer producers wanted. Given that all the shots in the trailer are roughly the same length, that particular shot may have the camera tracking the ball as it bounces away, making the actual shot longer than desired for the trailer. The trailer producers may have wanted to include a pitch and swing shot (classic Americana - but not with a football, of course!), but needed a shorter shot. Perhaps by digitally removing the football, they could cleanly edit the shot after the swing.

[John Cope]

I finally got the opportunity to read Malick's script for Tree of Life and am appropriately overwhelmed. Obviously, and especially given whose script it is, the final product may vary in many ways from what's on the page (it always does with him) but the script allows for that as it is pure flow from beginning to end, with little in the way of structured scenes. The voice over and dialogue all emerge from and are redirected toward atmosphere, texture, mood and comprehension. Often you can't even locate where any given dialogue is situated or originating geographically speaking. This aspect recalls Erich Auerbach's identification of the lack of foreground detail in biblical narrative (especially notable in Genesis and the book of Isaiah) as a pivotal aesthetic strategy; once again, given who it is we're talking about, this seems a more than appropriate reference.

It's all incredibly beautiful and reads like an extended reverie (a word even used in the script itself). For lack of a better comparison, it really is like Malick decided to make a slightly more familiar dramatic narrative out of Koyaanisqatsi. Flooring indeed. But the technique does inspire a couple further comments. Though there is that automatic assumption that the finished film will look and feel perhaps completely different since Malick is willing and able to "freely" adapt his own work, I'm less sure this time that the differences will be significant. For one thing, there is that quality I mentioned earlier, so utterly unique to this piece, that already allows for a variety of means of expressing each scenario or thematic notion. It is not, after all, what happens so much in Malick narratives anyway as how it happens. Then there is also the fact that this script reads very much like his finished films generally play or feel. That's a striking change from the days of that early Thin Red Line draft, for instance, which definitely comes across as an effort to do justice to Jones' original prose style. This time it's virtually all the poetry that that became.

This film is already being talked up as one with the potential to change cinematic form. That's a big assertion, of course, but the same can most certainly be said in regards to Malick's script and the calcified state of screenwriting at present. It could act as a valuable stimulant to the system. So much could be learned from his approach here. I was certainly tremendously inspired by it. But the obstacle to re-inventing form according to Malick's accomplishment or that of any other great for that matter remains the same. The breakthrough is staggering but remains a singular achievement. A form modeled on such an achievement risks a quick descent into stale derivation. Direct influence of artists like Kubrick or Malick rarely yields much in the way of productive return (notable exceptions being Haynes' [Safe] and Dominik's Assassination of Jesse James or van Sant's use of Tarr, all of which strove to expand upon the aesthetic breakthrough through an understanding of the essential accomplishment). Perhaps then the best and only valid inspiration we can take is in the freshness of the forms themselves, their suggestion of how much more remains actively available to our imaginations. There is a reassurance too, after all, in the knowledge that no artist's work ever emerged truly sui generis. At the very least there is a recognition of context and influence and that interaction with the continuity of historical or cultural lineage, to one degree or another, is often a means of determining greatness. We can be inspired without submitting to the stultifying act of locking down all their innovations into forms soon as predictably unenlightening as the dominant modes we have now.

[right_for_the_moment]

Sounds amazing, thanks for the thoughts!

[MyNameCriterionForum]

Paul at "All Things Shining" blog - whose advance info has so far been pretty reliable- suggests that TOL is still being worked on (and possibly delayed) by the big man in the Hawaiian shirt.

[perkizitore]

He started shooting another film and he hasn't even finished editing Tree of Life?!?

[MoonlitKnight]

He started shooting another film and he hasn't even finished editing Tree of Life?!?

I guess someone's finally gotten more driven after nearly 40 years.

[Murdoch]

The guy's a regular Woody Allen!

[Jeff]

He turned in a cut that screened to several studio executives once. I doubt it will be delayed. At some point, Fox will just have to take it away and tell him, "no more tinkering." If Malick had his way, he'd still be editing Days of Heaven right now.